


Between Sea and Shore

by SteadfastBrightStar



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 1830s, Drug Addiction, Historical, Historical AU, M/M, Merpeople, Mertalia, Parallel Narrative, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 23:43:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 51,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SteadfastBrightStar/pseuds/SteadfastBrightStar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two men, two centuries, one name. In 1830, Mathias is a jaded novelist battling a laudanum addiction, hiding a secret and trapped by hypocritical society. In 2013, he's a lonely children's author struggling to find his path in life. One will fall for a captivating creature of the sea, the other for a troubled man who seems not quite of this world, an illustrator whose pictures show far more than just the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An Empty Life

Beaches are strange places. They are part of the land, yes, but the sea also claims them as its own. Just watch as the tide washes over the sand twice daily, then recedes to its proper place as a misty line blurring into the sky at the horizon. And they can be dangerous. Pity whoever lingers too long on a sandbar, only to be cut off completely from land and safety. The sea, you understand, has no mercy. It takes no prisoners and makes no judgements, rolling indiscriminately back and forth as it has always done and will always do. But yes, beaches are strange places, neither one thing nor the other, a constantly shifting landscape. And many a strange thing has happened there, between sea and shore.

…..

Copenhagen, 17th May 1830

The room was like a deep and frightening cave, the weakly spitting candle serving only to illuminate the tiny corner of the room where it was most needed and throwing everything else into shadow. The gold lettering on the spines of the neatly arrayed books glowed flame-fierce in the yellowish light and the crumpled, days-old shirts strewn across the narrow bed appeared like sleeping animals in the half-darkness. The only sound in the room was the insistent scratching of a pen across paper, the wet sound of it being dipped into ink and the occasional tired sigh from the writer. It was coming up for two in the morning, every other house across the city submerged in sleep. Not so for Mathias Køhler, the lonely writer labouring through the night. He was not doing this by choice. There had been no wonderfully romantic spark of inspiration when he was on the verge of sleep, no muse refusing him rest until whatever work of brilliance it was had been poured out onto paper. No, the cause of Mathias’s wakefulness was far less idealistic: money. 

A respected member of the city’s high society could not be seen to be poor, not even a young writer like him. He had a reputation as a satirical novelist and fashionably jaded wit to uphold, these gifts granting him access to all the literary gatherings where men liked to take pinches of snuff, swill wine around the bottoms of their glasses and act like they’d seen it all before. The more desperate among them, perhaps, would secretively decant a few precious drops of laudanum into the wine, to dull all their sensations and make the world-weariness less tragic and more a matter to joke about with slow voice and dry, urbane laughter. Mathias was in this latter group, and now he reached out for the tiny bottle that was never far from his craving hand and studied it with his writer’s eye – more to the point, studied himself. He was a sad specimen, he mused, a man who was totally entangled in the gossamer web of the society he tried so hard to lampoon in his novels. Then, he took a sip of the drug, not bothering to disguise its vile taste with alcohol, and he didn’t have to think anymore. He knew that, with awful inevitability, once he had surfaced from his trance, he would have a passable chapter completed, one that would get him a little more drug money and perhaps allow him to pay the servants and hold a small party as well. It was high time that he played host, or else he feared that people would begin to whisper, speculating about his lack of funds. But the relief that came from the laudanum was wonderful. And he was so tired…

Despite the maid’s best efforts to be unobtrusive, he was woken at dawn by the scrape of coals against the scuttle as she laid the fire. He straightened up from where he had fallen asleep over his desk and winced at the pain in his back from sleeping in such an uncomfortable position.  
‘What time is it, Lili?’ he asked, voice slightly thickened by tiredness and intoxication. The girl peered up nervously at him, then averted her gaze as she concentrated on the task in hand. His addiction was no secret among the servants.  
‘Six in the morning, sir,’ she murmured, busying herself with the coals and trembling a little through her uniform.  
‘Wonderful. And what amusements do I have planned for today?’ His tone, intended to be sarcastic, sounded defeated.  
‘The Beilschmidts are coming to dinner this evening, sir, then you’re all going to the theatre to see that new play.’ He laughed bitterly.  
‘Excellent! What joy, what joy. And just think, only another forty years or so of this. An awfully long time to devote to enjoying oneself, don’t you think, Lili?’ She stood up, having laid the fire a little less perfectly than usual in her haste to be out of her strange employer’s oppressive company.   
‘Yes, sir,’ she mumbled diffidently, then bobbed a quick curtsey and fled. Mathias was alone again.

Still stiff from a cold night spent sitting up, he rose from his chair, picking up the sheets of paper he’d covered the previous night as he did so. He never gave his writing more than a cursory glance. It was always excruciatingly bad, tragicomic in its depictions of young men’s dissolution – comic because of its humour, tragic because of its truth. Well, he thought grimly, it may not be any good, but it pays. He didn’t feel like sleeping again but it was far too early to be up and about – for the master of the house, anyway. Far along the corridor, he could hear the creak of doors opening and closing as Lili went about her duties. He worked her too hard, he knew that, but he couldn’t afford more than a few servants, not with the way his publisher was treating him. Going over to his bed, he stretched out on his side so that his hot cheek was cooled by the untouched blankets. He picked up the letter sent to him by his publisher and scanned it. Only a few phrases penetrated his opiated brain.  
Inferior quality… Stale wit… Unoriginal… Reconsider… He laughed, even though it hurt his dry throat.  
‘Inferior? Inferior indeed!’ he declared like a madman to the empty room. Then, the laudanum still coursing through his body hit him again and he slipped into sleep once more, the crumpled letter falling out of his hand, to be kicked under the bed and forgotten when he woke again. Such was life, and the inevitability of things.

………

Copenhagen, 12th January 2013

God, he was tired, Mathias thought to himself as he prepared for a day of telling children how wonderful it was to be a writer and flogging his books to the accompanying parents. He really wasn’t feeling it this morning, having been awake all night. Lately, he was finding it impossible to drop off, always worrying about the next unexciting plot twist to stand between the heroes of his books and the utterly predictable ending. And now his publisher wanted him to take on yet another job, a new and child-friendly edition of fairytales, with special focus on Hans Christian Andersen.  
‘Just ‘cos I’m Danish,’ he muttered while doing his hair in the mirror. He splashed water on his face in an attempt to wake up fully. Maybe adult authors could afford to be reclusive and oblique and a little eccentric but he, as a children’s author, had to put on a squeaky-clean grinning front every time he did one of these frequent book events. Today it was to be a class of eight-year-olds, all eager – or not so eager – to hear about his latest book Fun with Ferrets, which pretty much did what it said on the tin. ‘Cheer up,’ he exhorted his morose reflection as he applied the last lick of gel to his spiked-up hair and studied himself. He was dressed in a calculatedly casual style, right down to the T-shirt with the Lego brick motif and the Converses that he may or may not have spent hours personalising on the website. Really, he had quite a good fashion sense, but he found that early mornings and school visits were not the most conducive to snappy dressing.

‘So, do any of you think you’d like to be writers when you grow up?’ Sixty pairs of eight-year-old eyes silently observed him. Brilliant, he thought. These completely unresponsive groups were always the hardest to deal with. ‘Anyone?’ he prompted hopefully. Still no answer. Several of the parents at the back were chatting. After a moment, however, a small green-eyed boy hesitantly put his hand up.  
‘I’d like to write about magical creatures and things,’ he confessed shyly, to the derision of his classmates. There was much eye-rolling and muttering ‘Oh, it’s stupid Arthur again.’ Mathias gave the boy a thumbs-up.  
‘That’s really cool!’ he said encouragingly. ‘What kind of magical creatures?’ Arthur hugged his knees, retreating into himself.  
‘Umm… Well, I have this friend called Flying Mint Bunny and I want to write about going on adventures with him.’ The little face broke into a smile. ‘He’s right here now!’ Of course, there was nothing there, but Mathias was desperate to coax some enthusiasm out of the children.  
‘Oh, there he is! Hello Flying Mint Bunny!’ He took the opportunity to move the speech on. ‘The thing is, guys, we all have a story inside us. All of us. Even if it’s just one. Thinking of the story is the easy part – it’s already in your heart, so you just have to let it out. The difficult part is making it a good story. A fun thing to do is carry a little notebook with you and just write down whatever comes to you. Stories don’t have to be boring like schoolbooks. Stories can be fun and exciting. They can make you happy or sad and they can make you think about things.’ He looked out over the assembled children. Most of them were sitting up straighter, looking interested. He allowed himself a small smile of triumph. Now for the sales pitch…

He got home late that evening, having had to go to a meeting with his publisher. He really, really didn’t want to do the fairytales but he had been threatened with having his contract withdrawn if he didn’t comply. God, he thought as he lay on the couch watching a mindless reality programme, he would never have imagined when he was starting out that the children’s book industry could be so… cynical. He cast his mind back to the little boy earlier, the one with the imaginary rabbit. If he’d been in the business of destroying dreams, he would have told him straight off not to bother. It was so difficult getting published and then, because he wrote for children, there was no respect. The books weren’t considered to be worth anything, something he hated. He despised pointless ceremony, the deliberate ambiguousness that characterised so many more ‘literary’ novels. The thing about children’s books was that they were open, their meaning clear.

Mathias himself was neither open nor clear. The persona he displayed to children, teachers and librarians who might potentially bulk-buy copies of his books was very different from his real self. It was true that he was a naturally happy and outgoing person, but he hadn’t felt that way in a long time. He was lonely and had been for a while now, ever since Gilbert had made it clear he wasn’t interested. God, he thought, how was he to know Gilbert was straight? Talk about leading people on… Well, maybe it was his own fault for asking him out. At any rate, he’d lost his best friend in the process. Now he didn’t have anyone. The TV droned on in the background but he was so tuned out that it might as well have been in a different language. He had once unsuccessfully auditioned for the X-Factor, it was true, but this humiliation that people brought upon themselves was of another order. So sad, this life, and so profoundly exhausting. 

He got up, silencing the TV with the click of a button, and went through to his study, figuring that he might as well do something productive to get out of this depressive mood. While there, he found his eye drawn to his illustration from The Little Mermaid, his favourite story. He’d always had a fascination with mermaids and remembered reading somewhere that there were legends of them in the sea off Norway. Perhaps there was a book in that, he mused. Then again, maybe not. But he was desperately tired, and thinking was just too much effort right now. He felt himself falling asleep, silver mermaid tails flickering through the blackness of his mind.

……….

Copenhagen, 17th May 1830 (Afternoon)

Mathias struggled awake for the second time that day with a head that was mercifully clear. The laudanum, apparently, had ceased to work its magic. He had no idea what the time was but realised that he’d best be getting ready for the evening. It would be difficult, for the guests were his best friend, Gilbert, and his wife, Elizaveta. And Mathias was hopelessly, completely and desperately in love with Gilbert, so much so that it was a struggle just to be around him. There was no point in hoping that Gilbert might secretly share his feelings, he knew that just by the way he looked at Elizaveta. He yawned and stood up. The shaving water that had been put out for him and gone cold hours ago and was rimed over with the dirt that was in the room and that was coming through the open window. Still, needs must. Having shaved, he rifled through his wardrobe for something clean and relatively formal to wear and oh… Maybe, just maybe, could he have another drop? Just to blunt the sharp edge of Cupid’s arrow…

The theatre was unbearably hot with the closeness of almost three hundred people packed in to see the first night of a new play that Gilbert had written. The curtain was not yet up but the grinding of instruments could be heard from the orchestra pit where they were tuning up. Mathias took the opportunity to observe his friend, to take in his hair that shone like moonlight, his garnet-red eyes and his elegant form shown off to such great advantage by his currently fashionable tight-fitting suit. He fanned himself with the programme, beginning to feel dizzy, although whether it was the heat of the auditorium or his proximity to Gilbert that was making him feel the way he was was impossible to say. The curtain rose and the main character appeared on stage. What was the play about again? He couldn’t remember. God, he felt awful. He breathed deeply, almost faint. He loosened his cravat and tried to focus on the action, on the young man flirting with the young woman.  
‘Mathias, are you alright?’ Gilbert whispered to him. He nodded.  
‘Yes, it’s just a little warm in here.’ he lied. Gilbert made a noise of agreement and turned his attention back to the stage, a frown creasing his face as he watched his work being brought to life. Mathias reflected bitterly that his novels didn’t need to be adapted for the stage – all one had to do was go into any fashionable drawing room. Such decadence. Such genteel poverty. Such hypocrisy. The heat was suffocating him. He couldn’t stay a moment longer.

Heedless of Gilbert’s hissed demands as to where he was going, he rushed down the stairs, through the deserted foyer and outside into the street. The stars were wonderfully, thrillingly bright tonight, exquisite little knives needling his vision. God, what beauty was wasted on ignorant people on Earth. He raised his arms and face to the sky like a mad prophet, inexplicably ecstatic.  
‘I will go!’ he cried to the empty street. ‘I will leave this place, and live in isolation. I’ll find myself an island and I will reign over it! I will be king of my own country!’ He gave a maniacal laugh and reached into his pocket, withdrawing his laudanum bottle. For a moment he held it up to the starlight, a sort of offering, then uncorked it and poured its entire contents down his throat. The world slowed down, the stars dimmed and faded and, for Mathias, the universe was reduced to his own breathing and the thick sourness of the drug in his mouth.


	2. The Island

Copenhagen, 20th May 1830

Mathias felt like he was wrapped in layers of cloth, sounds reaching him dimly and only the occasional glint of light coming through his stupor. He tried to shift his heavy limbs but they were numb and failed to respond. He didn’t dream exactly, but occasionally a strange vision or snatch of music would echo in the emptiness. This in-between state, however, was far from unpleasant. For the first time in a while, he felt truly untroubled. He was content to lie in this private darkness for as long as it pleased whatever higher power to keep him there. And then…  
‘Mathias! Mathias, can you hear me?’ Slowly, painfully slowly, he became aware of things. He could feel the cheap fabric of his bedsheets – no sense in spending money on things that guests would never see – and the limp, greasy brush of his untended hair against his cheeks. With great effort, he opened his eyes. Gilbert was sitting beside him, his paleness statuesque in the light from the window, grey circles of sleeplessness marking the whiteness beneath his eyes. Mathias’s wrecked brain tried to make sense of the situation. What on earth had happened?  
‘Gilbert?’ he managed to ask, voice weak and cracked. Gilbert’s face lit up with relief.  
‘Oh, thank God!’ he cried out, seizing his friend’s hand for a brief moment. ‘It’s been three days. We all thought we were going to lose you.’ Mathias sat up slowly, his head stuffy and sore. He was so thirsty.  
‘What happened?’ he enquired, half-wondering if he really wanted to hear the answer. The last thing he remembered was the stars, too large and bright and beautiful for this world, and how they shone eternal and undiminished and heedless of his anguish. Gilbert sighed and pushed his chalky hair out of his face.  
‘I couldn’t be seen to leave the theatre while my amazing play was still showing – it’s almost a shame you missed it actually – so I waited until the interval and went outside. I had a feeling you’d done something stupid. And indeed, there you were on the ground with an empty laudanum bottle beside you. I knew straightaway what had happened. I thought you were dead until I noticed you were breathing, ever so faintly. The doctor said you might never wake up.’  
‘Doctor? That’ll have to be paid for.’ Mathias said grimly. His headache hadn’t even started to recede. Gilbert’s look of concern changed to one of irritation.  
‘Is that all you can think about? You almost died, Mathias. For God’s sake, did you want to kill yourself?’  
‘I don’t know,’ Mathias admitted. Gilbert made a noise of frustration.  
‘You’ve been the name on everyone’s lips these last few days – and not for your writing. The romance of a writer with demons, I suppose. But really, you’re just a hack, aren’t you? As long as you have enough money to sweeten your wine every night, you don’t particularly care how you get it. Incidentally, your publisher dropped you.’ he added casually.  
‘Thank God,’ Mathias said with bitter jubilation. Gilbert shook his head in disbelief.  
‘Look, I know we used to be wild young things out on the town, but times have changed. I’m a married man and you… Well, I’m not sure what you are. But you need to do something to rescue your reputation.’ The events of that awful night were coming back to him now and with them the memory of what he had sworn to the dispassionate stars. All at once, he knew what he had to do save his sanity.  
‘I need to go away from all this madness. I’ve heard about those islands off Norway, the ones where no one lives. If I could spend a few months or a year there, maybe I could get to understand myself better. I could find my muse again, if indeed I ever had one.’ 

Later, once Gilbert had left, Mathias thought over his plan once more. It was a good one, if a little drastic. But total separation was exactly what he needed. He was only twenty-five years old and yet he had already sold off his soul piece by piece to the cynical allure of high society, of wit and wine and artifice. And he needed to be away from Gilbert, who still provoked such strong and illicit feelings in him. It was so hard to resist temptation when he was near him. Surely a spell without seeing him would cause his attraction to be forgotten, or at least made less all-consuming. But all these thoughts were crowding his mind. Unsteadily, he rose from his bed, unlocked the bottom drawer of his dresser and reached in, feeling the satisfying coolness of glass bottles and hearing their musical clinking in the darkness. He wouldn’t finish off a whole bottle like last time, no. That had been foolish, he knew that. He didn’t know why he had done it. A gesture of frustration, perhaps, or anger, or loneliness, or some hopeless form of social protest. But he knew his limits now. And a little drop, just a tiny taste, surely couldn’t hurt. At any rate, it would certainly cure his headache.

……

Copenhagen, 13th January 2013

Click… Click… Mathias scrolled aimlessly down the Google results page for ‘fairytale illustrators’. He knew and accepted that, in the eyes of children, his words would only ever supplement the pictures, and so he was desperate to get it right. But nothing quite seemed to fit the bill. So far this morning he had seen washed-out pastel coloured princesses, nauseating amounts of glitter purporting to be ‘fairy dust’ and some rather glaring anatomical flaws in some of the more amateur drawings. He was on the verge of giving up, and it was with a sigh that he clicked on the next website on the list. If this wasn’t it, he promised himself, he’d call it a day.

This was it. Mathias felt a flutter of excitement as he studied the pictures, almost photographic in their incredibly high quality. And such detail. His eyes alighted on one of Cinderella scrubbing the kitchen floor, her once-fine dress faded and dirtied by physical labour, glistening drops of water falling to the tiles as she wrung out her cloth, her features tired and prematurely careworn. He had never seen such realism. There was an ‘about the illustrator’ button at the top of the page and he clicked it eagerly, already imagining what the book would look like. Perhaps some of Cinderella’s misery would have to be toned down for the children, but it was an extremely promising start. The page loaded and displayed a calculatedly minimal description: Lukas, 25, art graduate. Commissions taken here. Below that was an artistic black-and-white photo of a serious-looking young man with untidy hair that Mathias guessed was blond in real life and dark eyes that had a bleak look to them. His lips were full and unsmiling and he glared at the camera with severity. Typical artist, Mathias thought. He clicked the link to the commissions page and began to type in his request.

Dear Lukas,  
I’ve just been looking at your website and I must say, I’m very impressed by your talent. I’m a children’s author about to start writing a collection of fairytales and I think you’d be perfect for the job. Please tell me if you’re interested.  
Thank you in advance,  
Mathias Køhler

Now we wait, he thought as he shut down the computer. The day had been too long and very frustrating, hours spent doodling in the margins of his notepad as he waited for inspiration. He hated days like these, days that might never have happened for all he’d managed to achieve in them. At least he’d always have his library, his sanctuary. And now would be a good time to look through one of his favourite books. One of those strange little tricks of fate was that there had, in the nineteenth century, been a writer with the exact same name as him. Mathias had discovered him while googling himself one day and had quickly become fascinated by the man’s story. On the surface of it, there was very little to distinguish him from the other writers of mediocre social satires, and yet that wasn’t what was interesting about him. Mathias saw himself in this man who had briefly grasped fame, died young and descended into obscurity and, in his darker moments, feared he might mirror his decline. And then there was the mystery of this first Mathias’s death. His life dates were 1805-31 and no one was quite sure what had happened to him to carry him off at the age of twenty-six. And, once his fleeting popularity had flamed and died, no one cared any longer. Probably the laudanum, they said. It was well-established that he had been an addict of the first order, consuming the stuff like water.

Going into the library, Mathias picked one of his predecessor’s volumes off the shelf. He’d had the devil’s own job finding this one, a typing-up of the unfinished manuscript of the last novel. It was sad really. When the literary scholars talked about the first Mathias, a rare event, they often compared his soulless works with this, this novel that could have been a masterpiece. No one could account for this disparity in quality. Maybe it was a forgery, or a copy of another writer’s work. Maybe some unknown, unnamed muse had inspired it. No one would ever know now. He opened it up to the title page and looked at the small engraving of the author. There was quite an astonishing physical resemblance between them, Mathias thought. And the similarities went deeper than that. The portrait made him look helpless, like one trapped by the self he had created. Mathias could sympathise with that, with always having to appear a certain way no matter how he felt. 

……….

Stavanger Harbour, Norway, 27th May 1830

The mist hung heavy over the harbour, banners of cloud turning the sky into a single unblemished sheet of dove-grey. Mathias and Gilbert stood together on the jetty, watching as all Mathias’s possessions were loaded onto a small sailing boat, ready for their journey to the remote, distant archipelago. They were silent, a small calmness in the bustle of the waterfront as people went back and forth, shouting to each other in Norwegian with Mathias straining his ears to understand. The two languages weren’t too different. It was the accents that caused trouble. Gilbert broke the silence.  
‘It’s not too late to reconsider, you know,’ he said casually. ‘A year’s an awfully long time to be away from all the joys of city life. And what if you run out of food?’ Mathias shook his head, more serious than his usual self.  
‘I’m certain about this, Gilbert,’ he said with conviction. ‘I need the time away and besides, this is generating more money for me than I’ve had in a while – what was it you said, ‘the romance of a writer with demons’? People will be intrigued by me – they’ll all want to know me when I come back. And I won’t run out of food. I’ve brought so much.’ The boat was all packed and the two-man crew were making no effort to disguise their impatience to leave. Gilbert pulled him into a manly hug.  
‘Look after yourself, then. And who knows, you may even find yourself a beautiful mermaid for a wife.’ Mathias smiled thinly.  
‘Perhaps,’ he replied, and stepped into the boat. The ropes were cast off and, with a sickening jolt, the vessel began its unsteady journey into the mist, to an island where no man had set foot in over fifty years and where the only mark of human life was a small, austere, stone-built house that would be his home for the next year.

The journey was far from comfortable. Mathias had never been a seafarer – even the short trip from Copenhagen had left him shell-shocked – but mercifully he managed not to be sick. Something about the sailors’ surly demeanour told him that that sort of thing would be most definitely unwelcome. He hunched in the bow, bundled in with his suitcases, and watched the patchwork of colourful houses recede and vanish in the thickening fog. He drew his jacket more tightly round himself and shivered in the piercing air. Late spring indeed. Scanning the horizon, he sought out his new home. Almost reflexively, he found his hand going to his pocket and closing round his precious cargo. Yes, he had gone away to reclaim his soul and recover from his infatuation with Gilbert but there was one thing that no amount of travel could ever cure him of. Nestled deep in the fabric lay a single, glistening bottle. It, and the knowledge that there were others in his luggage, calmed him. 

……

Copenhagen, 14th January 2013

Dear Mathias,  
In answer to your email, I would be interested in taking on your commission, if you will provide me with some idea of what you want. You say you write for children. If so, my drawings may not be exactly what you are looking for.  
Lukas Bondevik

Mathias read over the email again, confused. It was glacially formal, standing in sharp contrast with his own writing, and this Lukas person hadn’t even thanked him for the compliment. More troubling still, what was this about the writing for children? Perhaps the emotion in some of the pictures was very… strong, but he couldn’t see the issue in making it a bit less intense without losing any of the technical brilliance. Taking a sip of his coffee to fortify himself, he began to write a reply.

Dear Lukas,  
Thank you for replying so quickly – it’s very helpful! I don’t think that we can really get to know each other over email, so if you can make it, might I suggest meeting up at some point? I live in Copenhagen but I’m willing to travel – from the name, I’m guessing you’re from Norway. Anyway, thank you very much for getting back to me, and I hope that our creative partnership will be a harmonious one!  
Mathias Køhler

He clicked ‘send’ and watched the message disappear into the ether. This done, he decided to answer a few of the emails from his adoring fans, as he liked to call them.

Dear Mr Writer,  
I really like your books and I think your story about ferrets was very funny. I want to write books when I am big and I have written one already I hope you like it.   
Love, Alfred F. Jones (the F. stands for funny because my stories are very funny)  
PS: My friend Arthur met you and he said you were very cool because you could see his magic rabbit thingy.  
Mathias scrolled back up to the top of the email and sure enough, there was an attachment containing this so-called ‘book’. With a smile, he opened it up. No matter how much the publishers annoyed him, the children for whom he wrote were always a source of great joy, particularly when they took the time and initiative to contact him. He looked over the story and saw that it was only half a page long and seemed to have the author as the main character.

Once upon a time there was a boy called Alfred and he lived in a really huge castle with turrets and everything. And he was a prince but not a boring prince a really cool one with armour and a horse. One night a dragon attacked the castle while everyone was asleep so Prince Alfred put his armour on and got on his horse and shot the dragon with his machine gun and it died and then everyone was happy because the dragon was dead and they all said ‘wow Alfred, you are a HERO.’ The end.

Well. Not a great deal he could say to that, and he would hardly describe the story as ‘funny’. At any rate, he was distracted by another message from Lukas pinging through. Surprised by its promptness, he clicked on it.  
Dear Mathias,  
Although I come from Norway, I also live in Copenhagen, so a meeting should not be too inconvenient. I don’t particularly care where we meet, so you can decide. I only ask that it not be somewhere too crowded or noisy – I have frequent headaches and busy places grate on me. I am free every day, so I will leave the choice of date to you.  
Lukas Bondevik

Progress. And how convenient that they lived in the same place. Smiling, Mathias began to reply, suggesting that they meet on Saturday morning in his favourite coffee shop. He had a real sense that something exciting was about to begin.

……….

Havmann Island, off the west coast of Norway, 27th May 1830

Mathias looked out over the sea at the little boat that had brought him to his new home as it disappeared, white sail flashing against the bluish slate waves. Once it was completely gone from his sight, a realisation began to settle over him. For a full year, he was going to be totally alone, without a single moment of human company. Too late now to question his decision, he thought, turning so that he could see the undulating slopes of barren land, rocks covered by the thinnest layer of coarse grass. Not a single edible crop would grow in such a place, so he would be left with the preserved and unappetising things he had carried with him. People thought he was mad, but it was the good sort of madness, the literary sort. It was 1830, after all, the time of High Romanticism. And what could be more romantic than a troubled man finding salvation? Just as long as he did it all a good distance from polite society. He half-thought that someone should paint his portrait, the proud and deluded ruler of an islet in the cold and unforgiving sea.  
‘I am monarch of all I survey!’ he quoted. ‘And sovereign and subject equally,’ he reflected, making up the last bit himself. High above, a long, rolling thunderclap tore through the sky, followed a few seconds later by violently heavy raindrops. Sighing, he retreated indoors. His first storm on the island. He had a feeling that he would have waited out an awful lot of these by the time the time came to leave again.


	3. Mystery and Discovery

Copenhagen, 16th January 2013, Midday

A weak winter sun gleamed lazily over the harbour as Mathias sipped his orange juice and waited for Lukas to make his appearance. He peered out to where the Little Mermaid sat on her rock, anguished face turned towards her home in the sea. The light shone on the burnished curve of her shoulder and glimmered along the legs that had come at such a great price, the legs frilled at the ends with the fins she had tried so hard to get rid of. He regarded her with sadness, the lost girl marooned out there, caught between sea and shore, trapped hopelessly by unrequited love. The story had always affected him so deeply. He’d have to include it in the book, he mused, though the ending of course would have to be changed for his young readership. Shivering a little in the cold, he cast a glance along the busy waterfront, hoping to catch a glimpse of Lukas. He wasn’t late or anything, but Mathias was beginning to feel a little nervous about meeting him. He wasn’t used to talking to people not like him, people not outgoing or enthusiastic. Ah… There he was. Lukas, looking every inch the artist, from his fashionable outfit of black skinny jeans, tight jacket and studded boots to the sketchbook tucked under his arm. Mathias waved him over.

‘Are you Mathias?’ The voice didn’t come as much as a surprise – quiet and measured and free of emotion. He looked up and met Lukas’s eyes, noticing as he did so that they were as blank and bleak as they had been in the photo. Under his empty gaze, Mathias felt strangely foolish. His speech was much like his writing, Mathias thought – no hello, no pleasantries, a complete economy of words.  
‘Yeah, you must be Lukas. Please, have a seat. Oh wait, just a sec.’ He pulled his bag off the empty chair and gestured for Lukas to sit. The artist lowered himself carefully and perched on the very edge, looking ill-at-ease. Hoping to break the tension, Mathias offered him a menu. Lukas took it and studied it, distaste plain on his features.  
‘Is there anything that isn’t absolutely extortionate?’ Mathias shrugged, a little embarrassed at having suggested the meeting place.  
‘You’re paying for the location, I guess,’ Lukas looked at him coolly.  
‘What location?’ Mathias pointed out into the harbour.  
‘We’ve got a brilliant view of the mermaid statue. I’d pay to see that every day,’ he said cheerfully. Emboldened by Lukas’s failure to respond dismissively, he went on. ‘She looks lonely out there all by herself, don’t you think?’ Lukas raised an eyebrow.  
‘Lonely? It’s a piece of bronze.’ Mathias was a little surprised. He hadn’t expected an artist to be so… prosaic.  
‘It’s what she represents,’ he explained, lamely even to his own ears. Lukas sighed.  
‘There are enough lonely people in this world as it is. Why is it that people care more about story characters than they do about them?’ He pulled a couple of notes out of his pocket. ‘Are you ready to order, then?’ Mathias reached for his own money.  
‘Here, let me. It’s the least I can do.’ Lukas scowled and held onto the notes a little tighter.  
‘What is this, a date? I may be an artist but I’m certainly not starving.’

Once they had ordered, an awkward silence fell over the two of them. Lukas laid his sketchbook across his knees and aimlessly ran a finger over the cover. Mathias observed him closely. Small, slim, elegant – to Mathias, he looked like a ballet dancer or someone equally, graceful, particularly since he was dressed so neatly. He himself, taller, more ungainly and wearing a stupid comedy T-shirt with a cartoon dinosaur on it, felt clumsy and out of place. Lukas’s remark about not liking noisy places came back to him as the discordant chatter of tourists rose around them and, clearing his throat, he asked nervously  
‘This isn’t too busy for you, is it?’ Lukas looked up sharply, apparently coming out of some sort of trance.  
‘I’d say if it was. You don’t need to worry,’ he replied shortly. He was about to resume staring at the ground when their coffees arrived. Something very close to a smile rose to Lukas’s face as he took the first sip from the steaming cup.  
‘So, umm… About the book,’ Mathias began awkwardly, still not feeling quite comfortable in Lukas’s unsettling presence.  
‘Yes. You say it’s for children.’ Lukas replied slowly, setting down his drink with an air of thought. ‘I’m not used to drawing that sort of thing. My pictures are…personal. I’ve never really drawn for any sort of audience.’ Mathias’s interest was piqued.  
‘Really? Where do you get your ideas from?’ Lukas seemed to withdraw into himself, clasping his hands protectively over his sketchbook.  
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he replied childishly, looking down at the ground. Mathias studied him carefully but it was as though a screen had been pulled over Lukas’s face, rendering its careful opacity even more impenetrable.  
‘Never mind then. Here, I’ll show you a few of my story plans…’

An hour passed more or less successfully. They each ordered a second coffee, then a third, and soon the table was littered with scraps of paper with single words or sentences in Mathias’s terrible handwriting and then ghost-like, outline drawings in Lukas’s careful style. Lukas had finally consented to open his sketchbook and his frosty demeanour was thawing out a little. But Mathias was only able to glimpse the first picture, only able to discern a blur of colours, before everything went wrong. A large group of tourists had come to sit near them. At first it hadn’t been too bad, although Mathias had noticed Lukas tensing up a bit when they had first arrived, murmuring something to himself that Mathias couldn’t make out. After a while, however, a second group had joined them and the noise had risen to such a level that people at neighbouring tables had begun to give them disapproving glances. Now Lukas was starting to look very uncomfortable, his knees pressed together, sitting nervously and awkwardly. A particularly loud laugh sounded from the tourists’ table.  
‘Oh God,’ he moaned, pressing a hand to his forehead. Mathias reached out to touch his arm in a gesture of concern but before he could was impaled on Lukas’s furious gaze. ‘You told me this place would be quiet,’ he hissed accusingly, his face white and drawn. Mathias squirmed under his anger.  
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s not usually so crowded. I thought it would be alright.’ Lukas wasn’t listening, sweeping all his possessions off the table and talking angrily, though whether it was to himself or Mathias or both was unclear.  
‘Stupid, stupid… Of course it’s busy, it’s Saturday… Ah! Oh God, that hurts.’ He broke off for a moment to put a hand to his forehead again.  
‘Do you have a headache? Are you ok to go home alone?’ Lukas responded to Mathias’s concern with an impatient glare.  
‘Of course I have a headache. That’s why I’m not supposed to be around loud noises. And I’m fine to go home. I’m twenty-five years old – this isn’t the first time it’s happened.’ He reached into his pocket and withdrew a crumpled handful of money. ‘This should cover it.’ He turned to leave.  
‘Hey, wait! We’ll talk again, yeah?’ Mathias called out after him.  
‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ he said ambiguously before melting into the crowd, a narrow smudge of black in the sea of clashing colours.

Mathias watched him go until his slim figure had vanished completely. He didn’t quite know what to make of this enigmatic man, an artist and yet unmoved by art, as he had demonstrated with the statue. Whatever his inspiration was, Mathias mused, it certainly didn’t come from other people. And why the headaches, why the inability to tolerate noise? Now he thought about it, Mathias realised that he had looked absolutely shattered until revived by the coffee – but why? He wondered whether Lukas too stayed up until all hours working – but then again, he’d said he was free every day so there was obviously no pressing commission to finish. Nonetheless, Mathias was at a loss as to what else it could possibly be. But the drawings! Even the outlines were perfect, fashionably sketchy, like figures conjured out of clouds of smoke. He fervently wished that he could have seen inside the sketchbook before Lukas had been frightened off by the noise but for now he’d have to content himself with his tiny glimpse; the angels had parted their flaming swords just long enough for him to catch sight of Eden. And he so badly wanted to see him again. His natural writer’s curiosity wouldn’t let him rest until he’d unravelled the mystery that was Lukas Bondevik. 

…….

Havmann Island, off the west coast of Norway, 28th May 1830, Early Morning

Mathias emerged, reborn, from his lonely house and looked over the island. The storm had barely left a mark, save for the fact that everything was wet, even though the previous night the thunder had crashed so loudly and the whole building rattled so much that Mathias had considered reviving his lapsed religious beliefs. But now an eerie calm had settled over everything. The waves broke slowly on the beach and against the rocks, not a breath of wind disturbed the place and not even the cry of seagulls broke the total silence. He felt like the last man alive – no, not the last, the first. He was a solitary reminder that somewhere, out beyond the boundless sea, there were others like him, that he had not simply been born out of the sea. Hatched out of a pearl, he thought, a faint smile rising to his lips at the fanciful thought. And then what would you do with the pearl? It would have to be a big one – maybe you could use the two halves as bowls for food or something like that.

All at once, he realised that he was thinking nonsense and his thoughts, in the absence of others to share them with, echoed too loudly inside his own head with nowhere to go. Far off in the east, the sun was rising, warming him through his thin shirt. He wondered what he’d be doing if he was still back in Copenhagen. Probably waking from a drugged sleep – or maybe, if there had been just a drop more in that bottle that fateful night, not waking at all, never waking. He was getting better, he told himself. Yes, he’d had a couple of drops last night but really, how was a man to get to sleep otherwise? It was the storm. He’d needed to calm his nerves, that was all – an exceptional case, that was it. At any rate, there was no one to judge him now. He didn’t have to keep justifying himself like this.

No one to judge him… No one at all, in fact. No more tiresome invitations to sip wine with the elite, laughing at their jokes and blinking as the laudanum in his drink made everyone’s voices slow, made the lights trail across the room like lazy comets and dulled the pain in his heart. No more sitting up all night, forcing words out of his uninspired brain then watching as they spilled onto the page and sat there, mocking him, words that he viewed with as much revulsion as if they had been written in his own blood. And no more Gilbert. No more hopeless burning of attraction. No more frustrated nights where he lay, too hot and uncomfortable, trying to get his maddening image out of his mind long enough to let him fall asleep. And no more jealousy seeing him with Elizaveta, jealousy so strong that it disgusted and frightened him. He was ashamed that Gilbert had found out about his addiction. Well, everyone knew now, but Gilbert was different. Long after life had become a boring game, one where you glanced at the clock more often than your cards, his feelings for Gilbert had remained vibrant and whole and sincere. Gilbert had been the one person he still cared about impressing, the one person who could still make him happy. What bad luck, Mathias thought bitterly, that that one person had to be a man, and a married one at that. Analysing himself, he imagined himself in a mirror, belatedly remembering that he hadn’t brought one. He didn’t look like one of those men, or so he hoped. He was tall, fairly well-built and masculine and was certainly loud enough and – at times – uncouth enough to ward off any accusation of effeminacy. But he would still have to get married at some point, or people would begin to talk. He didn’t blame them, really – after all, they had nothing else to do. Within a few years, they would connect an unmarried but hugely eligible young man and his complete lack of interest in a surplus of unmarried girls on the marriage market. And such thinking would lead to an inevitable and unpalatable conclusion.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his steadfast friend, the elegant perfume bottle that held something that smelt far more bitter than roses or orange blossoms or cedars. Such a beautiful container for something so ugly. But his thoughts were still too loud, drumming ceaselessly on his skull. He wasn’t mad enough to talk to himself, not yet. The laudanum burnt his throat as it went down. Slowly and cautiously, aware that his reactions would be a little slowed by the drug, he began to descend the slope down to the beach, thinking that he might as well see the whole of his new domain.

The sea was blue, as blue as… what? Frustrated, Mathias tapped his pencil against the rock where he was sitting and staring out to sea. Not sapphires, that had already been done. Same went for the sky and cornflowers. God, writing had never really felt like hard work before. Away from his normal inspirations, he was trying to recover his art and make something beautiful, something that would override all the tired and ugly things he had written in the past. And yet he couldn’t even think of a way to describe the sea. He was a fraud, he thought, and he was deluded. He could spend ten years here, a hundred years, and be no more of a writer than he’d ever been.

He stood on top of the rock and, not quite aware of what he was doing, threw his notebook into the water. He had others, and this one felt blighted somehow, made impure by his miserable attempts at writing. It was a good feeling, watching it sink, a feeling of vindication. He almost threw his laudanum bottle as well, then stopped himself. That was going a little too far. Who knew how many more lonely, uninspired days would have to be somehow sweetened or shortened, hours lost in heavy and unnatural sleep?  
‘Damn it all!’ he yelled at the uncaring rocks. ‘Damn everything to Hell! All of it!’ He felt like a lunatic and, feeling as if he had somehow done something shameful, climbed down off the rock to retreat back into his little house. As he descended, however, his leg caught on a patch of barnacles and immediately began to bleed. Swearing, he knelt to examine the wound. And something caught his eye…

A single, perfect human footprint – not his, since it was bare. He straightened up, his eyes never leaving it. So somewhere on the island, there was a Man Friday to his Robinson Crusoe. Now, it was only a matter of finding him.


	4. Havmann

Copenhagen, 17th January 2013

Mathias clicked the refresh button for about the tenth time in fifteen minutes, desperate for Lukas to reply to his message. As soon as he had arrived home the previous day, he had checked his emails, only to find nothing – no apology or explanation – from Lukas. He had taken it upon himself to write and ask that they continue to work together but was yet to receive a response. He was beginning to feel the first hints of desperation. Having seen Lukas’s work, he couldn’t bring himself to enlist another illustrator, but if he didn’t manage to produce anything of worth quite soon, his publisher would surely get rid of him. The page went white for a moment while it loaded, then…Ah, yes. At last.  
Dear Mathias,  
I have given your proposition some thought and decided that I will be able to continue working with you. However, I feel that meeting in a public place was a bad decision on both our parts and one that we should not have made. My own home is hardly a suitable place for visitors, so if it is possible then I could come to yours next Saturday and we could begin work in earnest then.  
Lukas

Mathias had come to expect this coldness from Lukas but it was nonetheless something of a shock to take in the sparing, clinical writing. There was no mention of yesterday’s incident, even though he had asked in his email how he was feeling, and there seemed to be a reproach buried in the careful neutrality. He knew artists could be reclusive, but really… Nonetheless, he was grateful for this chance to retain Lukas’s services, and it was with a broad smile that he began to type his reply.

When the following Saturday crept around at last, Mathias felt as on edge as he had for their first meeting. He had cleaned the whole flat from top to bottom, then done it once more for good measure. There was something in Lukas’s constant, calculated distance that made Mathias feel he was being tested and found wanting. He peered at the clock and saw that it was almost midday, time for Lukas to be arriving. And sure enough, there came a short, terse knock on the door. He rushed to answer it, trying to calm his nerves.  
‘Hey, thanks for coming!’ he said cheerfully, gesturing for Lukas to come inside. ‘Come through, come through – please, take a seat, ’As he had done at the coffee shop, Lukas positioned himself on the very edge of the couch, as if preparing to run away at the slightest hint of danger. And he still hadn’t said a word.  
‘Do you want a drink? Beer? Coffee? Orange juice?’ Mathias asked, a little awkwardly. He felt ill-at-ease, as if Lukas was some kind of reviewer judging him on his hospitality. Sitting stiffly on the couch like a posed porcelain doll, his guest seemed out of place, his dark clothing and reserved manner incongruous with the colourful exuberance that was the rest of the room. He half-reminded Mathias of a delicate, sleek-feathered blackbird among a flock of macaws.   
Lukas nodded, a small, restrained motion. ‘Coffee, please,’ he said in a voice barely above a murmur.  
Still unaccountably flustered, Mathias retreated into the kitchen to carry out the order.  
‘How much milk?’ he called through to the living room.  
‘None,’  
‘Sugar?’  
‘No,’  
‘Um… How about a biscuit?’  
‘Just the coffee,’ Lukas replied patiently. Mathias was surprised at the plainness of Lukas’s tastes. Personally, he couldn’t stomach any drink that wasn’t either a beer or extremely sugary. He brought the tray through to the living room and sat down beside Lukas, some instinct telling him to leave a gap between them. He watched nervously as the artist accepted the cup and took the first sip.  
‘Is it alright? I didn’t know how you liked it so…’  
‘It’s fine,’ Lukas said shortly, cutting him dead and setting the mug back down on the tray with almost balletic grace. This done, he resumed his strange staring around the room.

Mathias knew he was a hoarder – it was what came of being sentimental like him. But now, as he watched Lukas’s emotionless eyes flick from one trinket to another, he felt himself becoming self-conscious. He saw Lukas pick up a messily-painted watercolour of a beach and regard it appraisingly.  
‘Your own?’  
Mathias blushed. ‘Ex-boyfriend got it for me. I’ve always liked the sea,’  
Lukas raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘You’re gay?’  
‘Um… yeah,’  
‘I wouldn’t have guessed,’ he said neutrally.  
‘We don’t all match the stereotype,’ Mathias replied, somewhat defensively.  
‘Believe me, I know,’ was Lukas’s cryptic response. ‘What is this place anyway?’  
‘Havmann Island. Some tiny thing. I don’t think anyone even lives there,’

Anxious to move the conversation on, Mathias flipped his notepad open to the page where he’d begun to write his first few paragraphs – just random things that came to him, be they beginnings or ends or disjointed descriptive fragments. He gestured to Lukas’s sketchbook.  
‘So, what delights have you brought for me today?’ he asked with strained brightness, trying to inject some levity into the conversation.   
Lukas extracted the sketchbook from his bag, running a dainty hand over its cover as if to reassure himself before opening it.  
‘Snow White. The poisoned apple scene,’ he announced in his perpetually flat voice, before placing the sketchpad down between them.

Mathias looked down at the illustration and registered a creeping sensation of shock as he took in its violent intensity. The princess, eyes half-shut, the shining bruise-dark apple with its nipped-out white crescent tumbling from her fingers. Her free hand pressed against the table, her face’s slick paleness, her teeth bared in a grimace of pain as the poison began to course through her body… It was a depiction of a murder, of unbelievable agony. He sighed in despair. There was no way he could use this in a children’s book. Casting a sideways glance at Lukas, he took in his unperturbable exterior, the glassy, oceanic eyes staring with disaffection at this strange product of his troubled imagination.  
‘Why have you drawn it like this?’ he asked, almost a whisper, irrationally frightened of the visceral image.  
Lukas seemed unbothered, almost matter-of-fact. ‘Because that’s how it’s supposed to be. You don’t bite a poisoned apple and go sweetly to your death. You scream. You cry. You struggle until the venom reaches your heart,’  
Mathias couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Yes, I know but… Imagine if you’d seen that as a child. You’d have been traumatised,’  
Lukas’s face took on its look of well-worn hostility. ‘You know nothing about my childhood. Maybe the picture would have traumatised you. Maybe it would have done you some good to learn that life can’t always be fun and happy. Because you don’t seem to know that yet,’  
‘I do know that, Lukas. But children don’t need to. When I do school visits, it always makes me so happy to see how innocent they are, how much they really believe everything can turn out alright. Cynicism isn’t something children should have to deal with,’ At the sight of Lukas’s unchanged expression, he hastened to add, ‘The drawing’s brilliant. Of course it is. But could you maybe make it a little less frightening? More subtle, perhaps,’  
‘What’s your obsession with writing for children? There are plenty of proper editions of the fairytales around,’  
Mathias paused to consider the idea. He knew – even when making his request, he had known – that Lukas would be unwilling to change his artistic style. There was so much raw emotion in the pictures that they clearly came from the heart. And did he really want to be so in thrall to his publishers? ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said at length, feeling even as he said it that he already knew the answer to be yes.

Later, when Mathias was alone again, a question came into his mind: what was Lukas, exactly? He considered this this as he cleared up the coffee mugs and untouched biscuits. Lukas reminded him the story ‘The Snow Queen’, where a young boy had become cold, callous, emotionless, and all because a shard of ice had lodged in his eye. He had never met someone like Lukas, someone who fairly radiated unfriendliness but who was at the same time strangely and maddeningly fascinating. Lukas wasn’t shy in the usual sense of the word – instead, he seemed to wear his opacity with boldness, almost pride, as though daring Mathias to ask or wonder. But wonder Mathias did. He tried to imagine what could have happened to Lukas to make him the way he was – surely something must have happened. He knew a silent boy could become an introverted teenager and in turn a lonely man. But he was fairly certain that such diabolical artistic inspiration would not come to someone, no matter how solitary, in the normal course of events. So Lukas must have experienced something truly terrible at some point in his childhood. Mathias was determined to find out what it was – and help him along the way, for he was nothing if not kind-hearted.

……

Havmann Island, 29th May 1830

The morning after Mathias had discovered the footprint, he set out to explore the island and discover who had made it. He had spent the whole of the previous day in the house, trying to rationalise what he had seen. Perhaps he had imagined it. Perhaps it was some unbelievable coincidence, the waves forming the perfect shape of a foot as they washed up and down the beach. He had spent hours wondering if he was going mad, then, when everything had got too much to worry about, he had taken three drops of laudanum and slept for fifteen hours. Now, armed with a pistol, a bottle of wine and a small supply of food that he intended to use as a primitive sort of peace offering if necessary, he was ready to find his fellow resident of the island.

It was not long after beginning his descent to the beach that he began to hear sounds, a sort of wet cracking sound like something damp being smacked against a rock. His hand immediately went to the weapon at his belt and his whole body became tense. Not knowing what he would find, he continued to walk down the steeply sloping hill, down to the point where it was possible to jump down from the elevated land down to the beach. Soon he was there and made his way onto the sand, wincing at the noisy crunch it made as his feet struck it. With the utmost caution and silence, he pressed on.  
Crack…  
Crack…  
It got louder and louder, no more than thirty seconds between each sound. And then, all at once, he saw something to make him stop dead in his tracks and cause the pistol to drop from the hand that was now limp with shock.

There, on the very rock where Mathias himself had stood the previous day, was the most beautiful young man he had ever seen. Unclothed, his skin gleamed with a sheen of water and his pale hair was saturated, making it seem darker than it was. Mathias watched, entranced, as the stranger reached into the water with practised ease and snatched a writhing fish from out of the shallows. With a sort of savage grace, he struck the shimmering creature on the rock, breaking its spine, and immediately set about eating it. So that had been what was causing the noise. Mathias had read stories about huldra, those evil things that took the form of beautiful women in order to lure men to their deaths, but he had never heard of any of these mythical temptresses taking the form of a beautiful man before. Captivated, he took a hesitant step forward… Only for his foot to strike a stone with a horribly loud sound. 

The man on the rock whipped around, revealing a face with the startlingly bright blood of the fish smeared all over its lower half. They locked eyes and Mathias saw that his were like slate – dark blue and dull, devoid of all light. The expression was one of fury and in terror Mathias fumbled in his pocket, producing his bundle of food and unwrapping it. His heart racing, he took another step forward and placed it on the sand, an invitation.  
‘I mean you no harm,’ he called out, praying that he would be understood. He bent and picked up some of the food himself, chewing and swallowing with exaggerated motions to prove that there was nothing dangerous in it. ‘Come and eat with me,’ he persisted, wondering if he’d be able to bring himself to shoot this exquisite specimen of beauty if the need arose. He was transfixed, the foolish young man in a fable, but the sight of this strange man, whoever he was, had robbed him of all caution. 

For a long moment, they remained in a tense state of waiting for the other to do something. Eventually, and with great trepidation, the man slipped down off his rock with a curiously serpentine motion and walked cautiously towards Mathias. He was perfect, like the Birth of Venus. Mathias felt like he should look away but couldn’t – at any rate, this man seemed to have no understanding of cultural sensitivities, standing without any sort of shame about his lack of clothing. Slowly, ever so slowly, he bent, mimicking Mathias, and took a small morsel of the preserved meat. He held it carefully between finger and thumb, seeming to study it. Then, to Mathias’s great shock, he spoke.  
‘What is this?’ he asked, in a voice that was flat calm, betraying no trace of the confusion and slight fear evident on his face.  
‘It is meat. From the animals that walk on the land,’ Mathias replied slowly. ‘You can eat it,’ he encouraged him.   
The man ate the scrap carefully, a frown of distaste forming as he chewed. ‘I never eat the food of the land. And I never will again,’ he said resolutely.  
Encouraged by having got the stranger to speak, Mathias spread his hands in a gesture of openness and asked, ‘What is your name?’  
‘My name is Lukas,’ the stranger replied, his voice still strong.  
‘And I am Mathias,’ Mathias said in turn, his fear disappearing.  
‘Mathias,’ Lukas repeated, saying the name slowly as if it was the first time he had been trusted with one.  
‘What are you?’ Mathias wondered aloud, seriously beginning to fear that he had come upon one of the beguiling and ultimately murderous creatures of legend. But Lukas seemed too real for that, too genuine in his wariness and inquisitiveness.  
‘A havmann – a merman. A man of the sea,’   
‘You have no tail,’  
Lukas gestured vaguely to a pile of rocks by the shoreline. ‘I can spend a little while on land when it pleases me. But you – why have you come here? Men of the land never come here, not even the men who kill the whales,’ Lukas’s piercing, intelligent gaze told Mathias that nothing but the truth would be accepted or believed.  
‘I am…’ he struggled to explain his exact trouble ‘… unwell. In my mind. I am very tired and I find that my life is no longer interesting to me. I have come here to recover by being alone,’  
‘Are you not lonely?’  
Mathias shook his head. ‘I choose to be alone,’ 

Lukas cast a fearful glance towards the sea and Mathias noticed that his pale skin had whitened even more and looked painfully dry. ‘I must leave you now. My time is short and I cannot live out of the water,’ He stood up again and turned away from Mathias. At the pile of rocks he had glanced at earlier, he stooped down and pulled something out from between two of them. 

Mathias felt his jaw drop in wonder. Clutched in Lukas’s small hands was a long, shining length of fish scales in the most delicate shade of metallic blue that it was possible to imagine. In almost a single motion, the merman laid this tail down on the sand and pulled it up to his hips as if he were doing something as mundane as putting on a pair of trousers. It seemed to fuse with his body, the first inches of skin just above it shining with a delicate blue. Mathias felt a surge of desire.  
‘Will I see you again?’ he shouted down the beach.  
Lukas turned to him with a look of patient sorrow. ‘Be careful, Mathias,’ he said ominously. ‘For once you lose your heart to a havmann, it will belong to him, and it is very difficult to get it back,’


	5. The Question of Emil

Copenhagen, 30th January 2013

Once, in an underwater palace built of the finest coral, gilded with the gold of sunken treasure ships and adorned with the brightest, smoothest fragments of sea glass, there lived a young girl, the daughter of the sea king. She was the most beautiful of all the mermaids, with a complexion as clear and gently pink as the secret inside parts of a shell, hair that gleamed with the purity of the sun on the waves and eyes that held the soft darkness of the deepest depths of the ocean.

Mathias leaned back from his work a little, satisfied with the opening to The Little Mermaid. With every word, he could feel his muse returning, giving her blessing to this new endeavour. He wondered what Lukas would think of it when he eventually arrived. The artist was, unusually, late on this particular Saturday and Mathias felt himself becoming anxious, eager to find out Lukas’s view on the story. Having agreed to work on what Lukas had termed a ‘proper’ edition of the fairytales, Mathias was desperate to impress him, to bring a smile to those soft yet stony lips. It would not be easily done. He got the impression that Lukas was not one to be caught out, that he held himself deliberately aloof from any feelings and was careful not to let his own show. 

Eventually, the long-awaited knock at the door came and, heart racing with excitement, Mathias picked up his notepad and went to answer it.   
‘Hey there!’ he said brightly on seeing Lukas, then abruptly felt his smile disappear as he took in his guest’s appearance. Lukas looked like he hadn’t slept in days, with his usually immaculate clothes carelessly thrown on, a greasy limpness to his hair and a painful redness to his eyes.   
‘Hello,’ he replied, giving Mathias a defiant look, one that dared him to make some comment or reproof about his lateness.  
Mathias struggled to regain his cheerfulness, trying to avoid Lukas’s penetrating eyes at all costs. ‘You look… tired. I guess you want a coffee, hm?’ He tried to sound upbeat, but Lukas simply regarded him with suspicion.  
‘I’m not tired. But I would like a coffee. Same as last time.’  
‘Ok. Yes. Coming right up.’ Mathias gratefully retreated into the kitchen, away from the evasive intensity that so characterised Lukas.

Once Mathias had brought the drinks through, just as he had done the previous week, he took a chance to observe Lukas. Having seen everything before, the Norwegian no longer looked around the room but maintained a fixed, exhausted stare directly ahead of him.  
‘Are you sure you’re ok? If you’re too tired today, we could do this tomorrow – or whenever you feel like it,’  
Lukas defensively tightened his hold around his mug. ‘I’m fine. I’m ready to start whenever you are.’  
Mathias opened his notepad to the appropriate page. ‘Ok. Well, I thought we’d start with The Little Mermaid, since it’s my favourite,’ He handed the notepad to Lukas, who took it without a word.  
‘Why?’ he asked once he had finished reading.  
‘Why what?’  
‘Why is it your favourite story? It’s so pointless. I mean, the message is basically ‘don’t fall in love’. No matter how much you love someone, no matter how much you change yourself to make yourself attractive to them, they won’t care, and you’ll be left alone. Even more alone than you were before,’  
Mathias felt foolish. Lukas was so good at making him doubt himself, his thoughts and his ideas. ‘Well, it’s a story of forbidden love. There’s a theory that he wrote it because he was in love with a man, something that back then was as impossible as a mermaid loving a land man,’  
Lukas shrugged. ‘That’s an interesting idea. After all, a love between land and sea never works out. I’ve never heard a story where a land man finds happiness with a mermaid – or merman, for that matter,’  
‘But it’s always said that true love will find a way.’ Mathias protested.  
‘Since when has love stopped death or misery?’  
Mathias had nothing to say to that.

After three hours and four cups of coffee each, they came to the conclusion that nothing would get done that day. Mathias felt burnt out after his earlier creative drive and Lukas, no matter how strongly he denied it, was too tired to put pen to paper. Having stared at a blank page in the sketchbook for far too long, Mathias suggested that they go for a walk to clear their minds.  
‘Where to?’ Lukas demanded, a hint of worry creeping into his toneless voice.  
‘Just along the seafront,’ Mathias reassured him. ‘There won’t be that many people out – it’s freezing today.’  
Lukas considered for a moment. ‘Alright. But not for long.’

Mathias went through to the kitchen to fill up a flask of coffee – he was beginning to see that Lukas pretty much depended on it to stay awake, although why he had such sleeping problems was a mystery. On impulse, he reached into the top cabinet and took out a box of painkillers. If Lukas was going to have one of his awful headaches, he thought, it would be good to come prepared. And maybe such a thoughtful gesture would make Lukas a little less stand-offish towards him.

It was a clear winter’s day, one where the cold was unmuffled by the clouds and instead came straight and piercing down, needling the bones no matter how many layers you wore. The weak sun lit the grimy slush that remained of earlier snow and glared off it. As Mathias had predicted, very few people were out, most preferring to shelter against the interminable numbness of such a day. He walked alongside the silent Lukas, periodically casting glances at him but finding that his calculatedly blank expression remained unchanged. Whatever thoughts he was having, they certainly didn’t show on his face.  
After a while, however, Mathias began to find the silence unbearable, and decided to break it. ‘So… Um… How’s life?’ he asked awkwardly, then immediately wished he’d kept his mouth shut as Lukas’s constant frown was brought to bear on him.  
‘What kind of question is that?’  
Blushing, Mathias struggled to explain. ‘Oh, you know, just interested in how you’re doing. You know, just how things are going.’  
Lukas shook his head. ‘You don’t want to know.’ he said in a voice that killed any further ideas of conversation that Mathias might have been entertaining.

After about twenty minutes of enforced silence, Mathias noticed that Lukas was beginning to look a little the worse for wear. He had slowed down his usual brisk pace and seemed even more fatigued than he had earlier.  
‘Are you ok?’ Mathias asked.  
Lukas pressed a hand to his forehead as he had on their first meeting. ‘Yes, fine. Just a little… sore,’   
Mathias thought he looked like he was about to faint. ‘You don’t look fine,’ he remarked, reaching into his satchel and withdrawing the painkillers. ‘Here, I brought some of these. Do you need one?’  
Lukas refused and sped up a little, deliberately – or so it seemed to Mathias – widening the gap between them. He had only gone a few yards when he suddenly stopped dead.  
Anxious, Mathias ran up to him. He took in Lukas’s sickly paleness, the pained expression on his face, the fact that he was trembling. Against his better judgement, he put a hand on Lukas’s shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he said soothingly. ‘You’re really not fine, are you? Look, there’s a bench just here. We should stop for a minute, just until the worst is over.’ 

Once they were safely on the bench together, Mathias took out the painkillers once again and proffered them. ‘I’ve brought coffee as well. You can swallow them with that and you won’t even get the taste of them,’  
At length, and with great hesitation, Lukas took one of the small white circles and swallowed it straight, without anything to disguise the taste. He shuddered a little as it went down, then stood up, clearly wanting to dispel any impression of vulnerability. ‘Thank you,’ he murmured.  
Mathias smiled as he got up. ‘Don’t mention it. But tell me, have you seen a doctor about your headaches? They might be able to prescribe you something better.’  
Lukas sighed. ‘There’s nothing any doctor can do for me.’ he said, in his usual mysterious way. 

And yet, as they retraced their steps, Mathias felt a peculiar sense of elation. For a tiny moment there, Lukas had… Well, not exactly opened up. But he had allowed himself to be looked after, to depend on someone else and accept help. And, Mathias realised, this small episode was a sign of something bigger. It was a sign that he was, at last, beginning to work his way into Lukas’s trust. He had a feeling that Lukas didn’t let very many people get close and he was honoured to think that he might, just might, become one of them.

They returned to Mathias’s flat in their now-customary silence, Lukas easily fitting the profile of the quiet introvert while Mathias kicked stones across the road and felt helpless in his enforced muteness. Once home, he found himself unwilling to be out of Lukas’s unwilling company and be lonely again.  
‘Are you sure you won’t stay for dinner?’  
‘I’m sure,’ Lukas replied patiently. ‘I just need my sketchbook and then I’ll be leaving.  
‘Ok. I’ll go and get it for you,’ Mathias said, trying to mask his disappointment as he headed to the living room and picked the book up from the coffee table where they had left it. He returned to the front door, feeling somewhat pleased with himself. Lukas had let him touch his most precious possession. That had to mean something, right? ‘Here you are!’ he said brightly, handing the book over.  
However, uncoordinated from lack of sleep, Lukas ended up dropping the sketchpad and it landed on the floor with a thump that made the artist wince. A single thick sheet of watercolour paper fell out from where it had been tucked into the back. ‘Damn,’ Lukas murmured, kneeling to pick the book up.  
Eager to help, Mathias picked up the spare sheet and turned it over to see that there was a drawing on the back. It depicted a little boy, no more than seven or eight years old. Although the colours were the barest hints of pencil, it was clear that he had striking violet eyes. In the corner, Lukas had written Emil in a spare, upright script. ‘Who’s this?’ Mathias asked, intending it as a casual question.  
Lukas snatched the paper away from him and pressed it to his chest like a baby. ‘A friend,’  
Mathias’s interest was piqued. ‘Does he know you’re doing this or are you going to surprise him with it?’  
Lukas shot Mathias an absolutely murderous glare. ‘He’s dead,’  
‘I… I’m sorry.’ Mathias mumbled awkwardly, shocked both at the news and the emotionless, almost brutal way in which Lukas had imparted it.  
‘So am I,’ Lukas replied, placing the page back into the sketchbook and turning to leave. ‘But that won’t bring him back.’

Mathias watched his elegant, smoke-wisp figure as he disappeared downstairs. He had never noticed before how careworn Lukas appeared, almost like he was living with some guilt or shame. He was a strange one, no mistake, one of those people who seemed to inhabit another world. As a writer, Mathias had spent his whole professional life looking to gain entry to that demimonde, where it was possible to mingle with creatures of the imagination while still remaining based in reality. But Lukas… Lukas was something else. And, Mathias thought as the last glimpse of the beeswax-blond hair vanished from view, he really was rather beautiful.

…..

Havmann Island, 1st June 1830

Three full days had passed since Mathias’s encounter with Lukas and already it seemed to him like some kind of lucid dream, when the emotions provoked by the experience remained vivid but the memory itself was tantalisingly half-resolved. Since Lukas’s departure, he had spent most of his time sitting on the beach where he had first seen him, desperate for another glimpse of the beautiful, elusive merman – and, when he failed to materialise, alleviating his disappointment with laudanum. Lukas’s parting words, the warning not to lose his heart, had stayed with him, and he worried that they would never see each other again. And yet he wanted to so badly. He sat on the rock where he had first seen Lukas, notebook open in his lap and a pencil dangling from between two fingers as he waited for inspiration. He had brought a box of watercolours with him but they were purely for amusement purposes – he had no artistic talent. If he was going to paint Lukas, as he so desperately wanted to, it would have to be in words. That is, of course, if Lukas ever came back.

He was buried in these helplessly circuitous thoughts when he heard a splash in the water just below him and looked down. His face lit up as he saw Lukas there, droplets falling from his hair, only his head and shoulders breaking the surface.  
‘I thought you were never coming back!’ Mathias exclaimed joyfully.  
‘I have,’ Lukas said plainly, moving to the water’s edge with a few flicks of his tail and heaving himself onto the sand with a scraping sound that made Mathias wince.  
He watched in fascination as Lukas, with a carelessness that came from having performed the act hundreds of times before, seized the middle of the tail with both hands and pulled outwards. It seemed to peel away, the gap widening and revealing his pale legs and lower body the further down it extended. This done, he snatched up the finned bottom edge so that the whole tail came off and then folded it carefully, placing it into a nearby rock pool.   
‘Can all merpeople do that?’ Mathias asked in wonderment.  
Lukas shook his head. ‘Only a few. And those that can, such as me, are ostracised. It is seen as a sign of impurity, of not being fully mer. We live alone, constantly going between sea and shore and belonging neither to one nor the other,’  
‘Aren’t you lonely?’  
Lukas smiled thinly. ‘I asked you the same question and you said you chose to be alone. And now it seems you’re seeking my company. But no, I am not lonely. It is true that I had no choice in the matter, but I hardly mind the solitude,’  
‘But you wouldn’t object to company?’ It was a question that could be interpreted on different levels, and Mathias intended it to be so. What they were engaging in was… not quite a flirtation, but the hints were certainly there if Lukas chose to pick up on them.  
‘I suppose not,’ Lukas said thoughtfully. ‘I was raised in the society of the merpeople until I was nine years old, so I’ve not been alone all my life,’  
Mathias shifted slightly and patted the rock beside him. Lukas accepted the invitation and climbed up. They sat together, a few inches between them, a gap that Mathias yearned to close as he watched the merman. A line from a book he’d once read entered his mind. It had been a small, poorly-bound work found in a corner of the library in his house and full of titillating pictures of well-endowed mermaids. He’d read it secretly, at the age of fifteen, always worried that his parents or a servant would catch him at it. He had lent the book to Gilbert, who had enjoyed the illustrations far more than him, for obvious reasons. The line, as Mathias remembered it, was:  
There exists a strong physical attraction between human men and mermaids, although this is generally pure lust, rather than any of the nobler forms of love.

Looking at Lukas, he didn’t feel lust, although he did see his attractiveness. No, far more than any physical considerations, he found Lukas interesting. He wanted to know more about the strange underwater world that he had never even believed existed before they met.  
‘What happened when you were nine?’ he asked after a few moments of silence.  
Lukas shook his head. ‘It hardly matters. There was an accident involving me and another mer-boy, Emil – my friend. I was made to leave the group after that. It was already known that I was one of those that could spend time on land, but normally we would be raised as part of the group and only made to leave before the final coming-of-age. I had to fend for myself early.’  
Mathias had a feeling that he would get no more information out of Lukas and instead fixed his gaze on the sea. He wondered about how many merpeople there were. And, if they were real, how many more creatures could there be? He found himself lost in a fantasy of a dark forest filled with elves and fairies, water nymphs swimming in the lakes and a vast dragon coiled round a secret stash of gold. And, in that moment, a new story came to him, one of such imagination and innovation that he was sure it would restore his reputation. But not yet. He was a poor writer, but he had some understanding of how writing itself was done, and he knew that the idea would have to be left alone for a while, that days or weeks would have to be put aside for it to mature before he would be ready to commit the first hesitant words to paper.

‘I have a question for you, landman,’ Lukas said in a thoughtful voice, jolting Mathias out of his daydream.   
‘What’s that, then?’  
‘Most of the landmen want to kill us. We have to hide, for if we let ourselves be seen then we risk being shot. You had a gun and yet you did not use it. Why?’  
Mathias struggled to form a coherent response. He turned to look Lukas in the face and felt another wave of attraction as he began to sink into his eyes, the eyes that were the deep blue of the shadows between trees at evening. ‘I did not shoot you,’ he started uncertainly. ‘Because… Because at first I was shocked. I didn’t know that mermen existed, let alone that I would see one. And then, even though I feared you might be dangerous, I did not shoot because… I thought you were beautiful. I thought you were the most beautiful man in all land and sea,’ he admitted, forgetting for a moment the danger that lay behind loving someone from the sea.  
Lukas frowned slightly, seeming to consider the idea. His frown deepened. ‘Remember not to fall in love, Mathias,’ he murmured, absently running a lithe hand over the slippery rock as he looked over Mathias’s shoulder to somewhere beyond.  
‘I can hardly control it,’ he countered weakly. ‘And is it really so terrible to desire a merman?’  
‘A love between land and sea can never end happily, Mathias,’ Lukas said gently. The use of the name was strangely intimate and Mathias found that he liked hearing it spoken in another’s voice.  
‘Maybe there just hasn’t been a first time yet,’   
‘Are you willing to take the risk?’  
Mathias smiled. ‘I do believe I may be.’

Ah, Lukas… Mathias sat contentedly on his rock staring out to sea even long after the merman had vanished. He felt somehow blessed, as though the veil between the worlds of fantasy and reality had been lifted just for him to go through, then let fall before anyone could follow him. His mind was full of Lukas, his beautiful form and features, his soft voice and his mysticism. He was tortured and tantalised by his exquisiteness and hopelessly, hopelessly attracted to him. Lukas seemed, if not frightened, then suspicious of love, and it occurred to Mathias that the idea of stolen hearts might work both ways – that Lukas too might run the risk of falling too far for him. At any rate, he hoped that Lukas would return, for he was already missing.

With a faint smile, he picked up his pencil – not to write anything, just to give him the necessary focus. The idea that had come to him earlier returned to his mind and he was beginning to see the outline of his new novel, the consummation of his talents. It would be the tale of a young man who thought himself lost; a young man who would find salvation in the world of fantastical creatures, only to be condemned, ridiculed and institutionalised by a society that failed to understand such deviation from the norm. The protagonist would be called Lukas, and the book would be his masterpiece.


	6. Ask Me No Questions

Copenhagen, 1st February 2013

“… And that, guys, is why you should never trust a ferret!” Mathias shut the book with a flourish, smiling indulgently as his young audience giggled and squealed. He had always been a good storyteller. The crowd of eager faces numbered about thirty or forty – a good turnout, he had always been told, for a writer in his twenties with only a few books to his name. And he so loved these events, when he got to really connect with his readers. He was a frequent attraction at the bookshop, one of those where it really was possible to get lost in the labyrinthine shelves and where, inhaling the cultured sweetness of paper, you could discover things about almost every conceivable subject. He loved the place, and would often spend a couple of hours there once the children and their parents had left before returning home, muse newly invigorated, to write.

Ah, yes. Writing. He hadn’t done any of that for two days, not since Lukas’s hasty departure and the discovery of Emil’s portrait. He hoped sincerely that he hadn’t scared Lukas away, that the picture hadn’t been such an intolerable violation of his privacy that he wouldn’t come back. He was really beginning to like Lukas, and found that he was fascinated by him. Never had he had the pleasure of working with such a talented illustrator before. In his other books, the pictures were little more than cartoons – amusing in themselves, but somehow Mathias always had the feeling that they weren’t really art, not like what Lukas was capable of producing. And in order to retain Lukas’s skills, he would have to tread carefully. To lose him would spell the end of the fairytale project.

With these thoughts in his mind, he turned to face the first of the jostling parents and, smile firmly in place, allowed himself to be congratulated on his stories and hear the testimonies of mothers who told him their children had never even picked up a book until they had started reading his. Some of the more pushy parents would even shove crumpled pieces of notebook paper into his hand, begging him to ‘proofread’ whatever their young prodigies had created – something that he always politely refused, saying that children needed time to ‘discover their unique writing styles’ before publication. Normally, he would have enjoyed all these, but today he was a long way off, thinking of Lukas.

It was over an hour before he finally managed to leave, and it was with great relief that he hid himself in the mythology section, his favourite part of the shop. Here, one could find stories from every corner of the globe, stories that travelled along the Silk Road, stories that were borne on the trade winds, stories from the depths of the Scandinavian forests or the sweeping, barren landscapes of Ireland or the lonely English moors… It went on. Mathias found that he could never walk out of the shop without a new volume of fairytales tucked under his arm. 

Today, a book on mermaids caught his eye, a collection of paintings through the ages with an explanation of the different legends from around the world. He slipped it off the shelf, feeling its satisfying weight, and opened it to the middle. He was greeted by a dramatic, nineteenth-century rendering of Odysseus’s temptation by the sirens, their womanly figures vastly exaggerated to compensate for the public propriety of the age. Odysseus himself, ears blocked by wax and lashed to the mast, was attempting to be faithful to his Penelope, while the crew stared in awe at the finned women, whose long dark hair did not quite cover the more private areas of their bodies. It was sad, he thought, how such fascinating creatures were so routinely reduced to objects of lust and desire. There was so much more to them than that. Still, it looked like an interesting read for the evening. Smiling to himself, he tucked the book under his arm and made for the till.

He stopped dead halfway there, then slowly retraced his steps, a familiar blond head having caught his eye. Was that… Lukas, sitting poring over an academic-looking book in the psychology section? He peered round the corner of the shelving unit, trying not to be noticed. Yes it was, right down to the errant hair curl that stuck out at the back. Mathias secretly wanted to know what would happen if he pulled it. It was a strange sight, like spotting a teacher on a date. He had come to associate Lukas so much with his weekly visits that it was a surprise to see him alone, living his own life. Whatever he was reading, he seemed completely lost in it, a frown of concentration marking his forehead as he forged a passage through the dense text.  
“Hi!” Mathias said in a bright yet quiet voice, raising a hand in a hesitant wave.  
Lukas looked like he’d been caught doing something illegal. He shut the book immediately and stood up, a spray of scarlet rising to his cheeks. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, automatically defensive.  
Mathias shrugged, trying not to show that he was surprised by the reaction. “Just having a look around. I was doing a book signing earlier, so I thought I’d stay for a bit.” he replied nonchalantly.  
“I don’t come here very often.” Lukas said softly, as if trying to excuse the fact he’d been there at all. He wrapped his arms around himself, ill-at-ease.  
“Neither do I. Oh, and while we’re both here, are you still good for Saturday?” His voice was hopeful. He’d come to look forward to the visits.  
“I… I have an appointment,” Lukas took a deep breath, as if preparing to say something that would change his life. “But I’ll give you my address so you can come and have a look at the pictures then.”  
Mathias nodded slowly. He knew that this trust was a gift, something that he would have to cherish. “Ok. What kind of appointment?” The words were out before he could stop himself and he instantly regretted his natural curiosity. He belatedly realised that he should have known by now that Lukas did not take kindly to questioning.  
Lukas’s face closed up. “You just can’t resist, can you? All these questions you ask me. All these questions, and you act like I somehow owe you an answer. All you need to know is that I’m busy on Saturday. I don’t go around asking you questions, so don’t do it to me.”   
“I don’t…”  
“Please, Mathias, just respect my privacy,’ he said beseechingly, almost pleadingly. It was the first time Mathias had seen him lose his calculated imperiousness. “I’ll email you the address.” he added curtly, having managed to deaden his voice once more, then walked past him without another word.

For a moment or two, Mathias stood exactly where he was, almost in shock. Excitement at getting Lukas’s address mingled with confusion at the way he was acting. What had he been reading, exactly? He hardly seemed the type to look at anything… unorthodox. He went over to where Lukas had been sitting and picked up the book, scanning the title in confusion. It said: Madness and Modernity - Changing Views of Insanity 1830-2013. It was a hefty volume, the kind of thing a PhD student would read, most definitely not for someone with an amateur interest. And Lukas was not a PhD student. But Lukas wasn’t… mad, was he? Yes, there were the headaches and the appearance he had of not having slept, but surely they could be caused by anything. There were his unusual views on romance, but cynicism was hardly a sign of madness. But then there were the drawings. Mathias stared down at the cover of the book, the letters beginning to blur as he continued to look unseeingly beyond. It was all slowly starting to fit into place. Lukas’s drawings looked like something out of a disturbed mind for one important reason: that was what they were.  
“The poor thing.” Mathias murmured to himself, setting the book back down where he’d found it and going to the till. He handed over his money without enthusiasm. For the moment, mermaids had lost all interest for him.

Midday the following Saturday found Mathias, a little better-dressed than usual, knocking apprehensively on Lukas’s front door. He felt nerves bubbling up in his stomach as he waited for Lukas to answer. It wasn’t the nicest area to live in; one of those places that had just begun the long process of gentrification, where there were police but still crime and welfare but still poverty. Then again, he supposed, all artists had to have their ‘difficult’ period. He knocked again, wondering if Lukas was still out and then, concluding that he was, leaning against the wall to wait for him. He had just got his notepad out of his pocket when an unkempt old woman, the kind you regard with pity or distaste, emerged from the flat across the corridor.  
“You one of them doctors?” she asked Mathias, fixing him with a suspicious glare.  
“I – What? What doctors?”  
The woman laughed. “Oh, they’re always going in and out,” She shook her head. “That boy. He’s mad! Crazy! Absolutely insane!”  
Mathias felt an urge to defend Lukas. “He’s not mad. He’s just not very sociable.”  
She laughed again, cruelly, at Mathias’s expense. “God bless you, my boy. He’s always been mad. Since before he got out of that awful place.”  
“What place? What are you talking about? How do you even know all this?” He felt his heart speeding up, irrationally panicked.  
“I’ve seen him coming back and I’ve seen him going again. Who knows how long it’ll be before they drag him off once more? Like I said, he’s mad!” She departed then, leaving Mathias confused and with a hundred more questions than before.

Lukas arrived about ten minutes later, giving a little start when he saw Mathias was already there. He certainly looked like he’d been somewhere important, having changed his usual all-black attire for a white shirt and navy suit jacket with his customary tight jeans. He had a tie stuffed into his pocket and he had undone his top button. Apparently, he didn’t like being trussed up in formal outfits.  
“You’re early.” The remark had none of the jocularity it usually carried when people made it – instead, it was almost a reproach.  
Mathias shrugged. “Yeah, I was awake and had nothing to do, so there was no point hanging around at home.” Then, hoping for details, he added, “You have some really weird neighbours.”  
Lukas tensed up, nervously wringing his hands. “Was it that awful woman across from me? I can’t stand her.” His voice was strangled.  
“Yeah. She asked me if I was a doctor. She said there were a lot of them and…”  
Lukas cut him off. “She’s drunk half the time and asleep the other half. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

He stooped to unlock the door, then went inside. Mathias followed, looking around the place like an indiscreet spy. The flat was utilitarian, a narrow hallway with four doors leading off it. There were two pairs of shoes by the door, their small size and narrow fit indicating that both belonged to Lukas. He stopped outside one of the rooms.  
“Stay here.” he ordered in a monotone, then slipped in, shutting the door behind him and leaving Mathias to guess at what was inside. There was a rustling of paper, then the vaguely melodic clinking of pencils as he searched for whatever it was, then he emerged. “I’ve finished all the Cinderella pictures.” he announced, angling the sketchbook so Mathias could see.

Mathias flicked through them in silence, impressed at their quality but beginning to pick up on the things that set Lukas’s work apart. In one illustration, the stepmother was striking her round the face. Lukas had shown her falling, an arm reflexively thrown up and her whole body twisted in the moment before she hit the floor. But the shocking thing was her cowardly father hiding behind the door, a look of sadness on his face even as he made no move to help.  
Lukas saw Mathias looking. “It shows that your parents can’t always protect you.” he explained.  
“Protect you from what?”  
“Anything. Just like mine couldn’t protect me. And Emil’s couldn’t protect him.”

Something told Mathias that the conversation was over. With a murmured goodbye, he handed over the sketchbook and left the flat. As he descended the grimy stairs, his mind began to whirr again. Lukas had clearly suffered even more than he had first thought, and wanted to discuss it even less. And Mathias knew without anyone having to tell him that the root of all this misery was Emil – or, more specifically, his mysterious death.

……

Havmann Island, 3rd June 1830

There was always more wine. No occasion was sombre enough, nor debauched enough, for another glass to be refused. For a young man new to high society, the freedom to consume the stuff was glorious and one of which he took full advantage. Indeed, the liberty was almost as intoxicating as the drink itself. But it was a curiously empty life, and the pleasure it contained was bought at a high price - one that a young man would not realise he was paying until he had already paid it.

Mathias smiled broadly, allowing himself a little self-congratulation. This was the perfect opening to his novel. Within moments of opening the book, it would be immediate that this was no gentle, indulgent satire but a savage attack on the louche way of life that he himself had experienced and come to despise. He hoped that the book would be divisive, and he hoped that it would provoke thought on both sides of the argument. For a minute or two, he allowed himself to fantasise about his novel sparking some kind of social revolution, then smiled at his own irrationality.

He set his notebook and pen aside and stretched out on the sand, staring up at the seamless blue banner of the sky that stretched away infinitely on all sides. It was a perfect day, the light warmth of spring beginning to deepen into the substantial heat of full summer. He was waiting for Lukas. In the bag beside him he had a spare shirt and trousers, for today was the day that he hoped to bring Lukas up off the beach and show him his temporary home. He felt his breathing evening out as he basked in the sunlight and his eyes slipped shut. His vigilance forgotten, in a moment he was asleep.

“Mathias!” He was woken by a handful of sand being thrown onto his face and Lukas’s impatient voice.   
“Ah! Alright, I’m awake!” he protested, sitting up and rubbing the grains out of his eyes.   
Lukas made a dismissive gesture. “I only have a short time on land, and I do not intend to have you waste it.”  
Mathias reached for his bag. “I want to show you my home today, so I’ve brought you something to wear.”  
Lukas took out the shirt and held it up in confusion. “Why do I have to put this on?”  
Mathias found himself blushing. “You just… We all do it on land. It is not considered… right to be without clothing.”  
Lukas shrugged but then seemed to decide to humour him and began to dress.

Once in the house, Lukas made a beeline for the bookshelves, having clearly never seen books before. Mathias felt his heart stir as he watched him, faintly comedic in his rolled-up shirt and trousers and his delicate feet bare against the floor as he pulled volumes off the shelves at random, flicking through the pages and breathing in their scent. He looked like an inquisitive child, but Mathias knew that he possessed an intelligence of a different sort, a practical intimacy with currents and tides and the ways of the sea, not to mention lightning reaction times and substantial strength. After all, this was a man whom he’d seen with his own eyes snapping the spines of fish against a rock. You underestimated him at your peril.  
“What are these?” Lukas asked once he’d gathered three or four of the books to his chest.  
Mathias went over to him to explain. “These are called books. All the little marks on the page represent words.”  
Lukas was sceptical and wanted to test him. “What does this say?” he demanded, pointing to a line in a poetry book.  
“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.” Mathias read out. “The poet wrote it when he was dying, and it’s about how he wants to live forever like the stars, always looking down at the woman he loves. See, the last line is ‘And so live ever, or else swoon to death.’”   
“Would you die for love?”  
“I like to think I would.” he replied. He didn’t tell Lukas that he almost had, and he certainly didn’t tell him that he still had his precious drug in his pocket. It was for helping him to sleep, that was all. And for when his thoughts got a little out of hand, when the sea seemed too vast, the nights too long and his soul too lost.

Lukas soon lost interest in getting Mathias to read to him and went over to the box of watercolours on the table. Mathias wished he hadn’t left his sketchbook open. He really was no artist, and his attempted still life of a pile of shells wasn’t turning out very well.  
“And what do these do?” Lukas asked eagerly, running a finger over the various colours and looking confused when it came out dusted in those shades.  
“You use these to make pictures,” Mathias explained. “You dip the brush in the water, then into the paint, and then you put it on the paper.”  
Lukas was eager to have a go, and as Mathias watched over his shoulder, it became clear that he had a gift for this sort of thing. There was an enthralling delicacy to his movements as he primly wet the end of the brush, then hovered over the palette while he chose the right shade, then began the careful business of actual painting. He worked silently, his usual serious expression in place, and after about an hour the picture was completed. He held it up for Mathias’s approbation.  
“Not bad for a first time.” Mathias remarked, taking in the scene. It showed the beach where they always met, and although it was a little messy, it looked more like the work of a student than a child. He felt a swell of love for Lukas as he took in his paint-marked hands, a few dots having even worked their way up to his nose and cheeks. “Hold still a moment.” he said, dipping his handkerchief in the water and leaning forward to clean away the marks. He seemed to have forgotten the fact that Lukas lived in the sea.  
Lukas watched him suspiciously. “What are you doing?” he asked warily.  
“Just getting some of the paint off your face,” Mathias reassured him as he began to dab at his cheeks. He laughed softly, indulgently. “How did it get up there, anyway?”

They were so close. Mathias tried to focus on what he was doing, even as he felt his heart speed up. His own breathing echoed loudly in his ears and he could hear Lukas’s as well. It didn’t sound forced yet – they still had some time together. As he worked to clean every last drop of paint, he took in Lukas’s coldly luminous skin, free from scars or blemishes or any other kind of mark. Their proximity was almost unbearable. And then, all too soon, it was over, Lukas’s face restored to its usual marble purity.  
“That should do it.” Mathias said happily.  
Lukas, as if coming out of a trance, put a hand to his cheek. “Thank you.” he murmured absently, looking off to the side. He picked the painting up from where he’d let it fall to the table and handed it to Mathias. “This is for you. I can’t come on shore every day, so I suppose you should keep one thing of me.”  
“Do you have to leave now?” Mathias complained, seeing that Lukas was already getting up.  
“I do. Thank you for the clothes. I will leave them where I store my tail and wear them whenever I come for you.” He paused for a moment, then, “And remember my warning, Mathias. A friendship is one thing. A lost heart is quite another.” He turned and went out of the door.  
Mathias followed anxiously. “What will happen if I lose my heart? Will I die? Will you die?”  
Lukas, with that same look of patient sorrow that he had worn when they first met, turned to give him a fleeting yet penetrating glance. “Merpeople do not die, Mathias. We are killed.”

Later, once Lukas had gone, he took a moment to think about what was happening between the two of them. Lukas’s parting words had confused him and left him not a little frightened. What did he mean about merpeople only getting killed? Perhaps, he thought hopefully, it meant that they could live forever if they avoided attack. What a wonderful thing immortality would be. Or not, he thought, as he realised that he was struggling to fill even his short preordained period on earth. With a smile, he picked up Lukas’s little painting and studied it, allowing himself to wonder where it might end up in a hundred years. Perhaps it would be hanging on someone’s wall, or at the back of a drawer, or long ago crumbled away. Still, he would treasure it. Turning it over, he picked up a pencil and wrote on the back: The Beach at Havmann Island, 3rd June 1830. He was about to write ‘by Lukas’ but then stopped himself. He needed something to remain private. After all, the very reason he had come here was to escape the madness of public life.

This done, he let his mind return to Lukas. He knew that his thoughts would have been easier to rationalise on paper but he had a strange feeling that if he wrote them down, they would cease to be his own, cease to be private. He had never kept a diary because he didn’t see the point of it, of this book that professed to be secret but was really the ultimate conceit, the idea that the writer had secrets to be kept when really they amounted to nothing more than snide observations about friends. He knew that Gilbert had kept a diary since childhood and that although he went through the elaborate motions of secrecy, he would really be rather amused if it was ever published or became public knowledge.

To this end, Mathias kept his thoughts of Lukas safely in his mind. He felt attracted to him, that much was indisputable. He had a perfect beauty to him, with a hint of otherworldliness that showed his origins in the unknowable sea. He wanted to make him happy through whatever means possible, and he wanted to understand him. He wanted to know Lukas, to know everything about him. He wanted to spend every moment of every day with him and it hurt to know that this was impossible, for Lukas could not live on the land and Mathias himself could not live in the sea. He knew that losing his heart and falling for someone who could never truly be with him was dangerous, but, as he had said to Lukas, he had hardly control it. Only time, he realised, could reveal how much he was willing to sacrifice for a cursed love, a love between sea and shore.


	7. Taken For Granted

Copenhagen, 10th February 2013

And so the beautiful princess and handsome prince were married, and in time they became the king and queen. They had three daughters and three sons and, although they were not quite of the sea, each child had eyes the blue-black of the northernmost ocean and a voice to warm the hardest heart. And although the little mermaid never forgot her home in the sea, she loved her life on land, and she lived happily ever after.

Mathias flipped his notebook shut and stared out across the harbour at the lonely statue. He felt like a fraud and a liar as he read over his ending to ‘The Little Mermaid’. This wasn’t how it ended at all, and it was wrong to pretend that it was. But then, he didn’t much care for the original ending either. Much as he respected Hans Christian Andersen, he found that the whole business with being turned into a ‘spirit of the air’ was rather contrived, an effort to add a Victorian morality message to the story and make it wholesome rather than merely a study in futility. But it didn’t work, and Mathias personally thought that it should have been left with a sad ending. He was an optimist, yes, but he didn’t like to be lied to.

He took another sip of lemonade and scratched patterns into the cover of his notebook with his pen. He didn’t feel any sense of achievement at having finished the first story of the book, merely an exhaustion, a feeling of being drained. When this feeling came over him, it meant that his muse wouldn’t be returning for a few days. He hated having to force himself to write and hated the mediocre work that he produced when the ink wasn’t flowing freely. He sighed and watched the people going by, trying to draw himself out of his depressed mood. His phone vibrated in his pocket and he heard the pinging sound of a new email. Must be Lukas, he thought to himself, taking it out to look.

It was indeed Lukas, and as Mathias read through the email, a frown gradually formed on his face the more he took in. Lukas wanted him to do… what? He read the message again.  
Dear Mathias,  
With a view to this Saturday, I think it would be better if you came to my flat. I’m expecting a visitor and it would be a lot more convenient for you to come as that way I won’t have to leave you early. This visitor will need to talk to me for a few minutes and he may want to talk to you as well. If he does, it will be to ask you some questions about me. We can discuss your answers to those when you come.  
Lukas

The email, almost desperate in its unconvincing explanations of why his presence was necessary, piqued Mathias’s interest. His mind flashed back to cryptic conversation with Lukas’s neighbour, when she’d mentioned ‘doctors’, whoever they might be, going in and out of the place. Maybe this visitor was one of them, which would most definitely explain why Lukas was on edge. Mathias still had no idea about what his exact problem was, and wondered if the visit would provide him with some answers. He finished his drink and stood up, casting one last look at the mermaid, then pulled his satchel onto his shoulder and began to walk home, mind still full of Lukas.

Saturday came, and the strange woman across the corridor mercifully failed to appear as Mathias waited for Lukas to answer the door. He stuffed his hands into his pocket and rubbed the toe of one shoe against the side of the other, nervous. After a moment of muffled chaos inside the flat, the door opened and Lukas stood there, slightly flushed and looking like he’d had even less sleep than usual.  
“Ah, good. You came.” he said, an emotion not too far from happiness in his voice – relief, perhaps.  
“I couldn’t wait to grace you with my presence!” Mathias replied, determined to keep the conversation light-hearted.  
“It was good of you to come.” Lukas murmured, a shy admission of gratitude.  
Mathias studied him carefully. He was immaculately dressed in a light blue shirt that made him look even more glacially white and dark grey jeans. His cross hairclip was in its usual position but the rest of his hair was a little neater than Mathias had seen it. He was clearly trying to make a good impression on this mysterious visitor.  
“You look… really good.” Mathias said awkwardly, caught out by the artist’s beauty.  
Lukas gave him a hostile look. “I make an effort.” he said without expression.

He beckoned him into the hallway and led him through one of the doors into a small living room. Mathias looked around, taking in the spare furnishings: two unadorned wooden chairs, a modest-sized TV and a shelf of thick art and design-themed books in fashionably muted shades. There were no pictures on the cream-coloured walls. In fact, he reflected, the room was like Lukas himself – plain, practical and revealing nothing.

Lukas gestured vaguely towards the TV, bringing Mathias out of his trance.  
“You can watch that or scribble in your notebook or whatever while he’s here. If he talks to you, tell him we’re friends, you’ve known me for a few months and you came over earlier than expected today because you knew I wouldn’t mind since I’m pretty relaxed.” He gave Mathias a pleading look, anticipating and blocking any questions he might have. “I know this seems strange but please, just do it. He’s an important visitor. I need to impress him.” With that, he left the room and a minute or two later Mathias heard the droning shriek of the vacuum cleaner in the hall. He felt a surge of irritation. Lukas was really messing him around today, and he could feel his blood rising. He had quite a temper on him, although he tried not to show it most of the time. He took a few deep breaths, placating himself with the promise that he’d ask Lukas for an explanation once this visitor had left. Because right now he was more confused than he had ever been in his life. 

After about half an hour, there was a knock at the door. The sounds of Lukas frantically downing coffee in the kitchen abruptly ceased and Mathias heard his soft footsteps hurrying to meet his visitor. He discreetly turned the volume down several notches on the TV, hoping to overhear their conversation without obviously eavesdropping. First came Lukas saying something, then a deep voice replied. Mathias froze. He knew that voice. It was Berwald, his old university friend. Well, he used the term ‘friend’ loosely. More like occasional drinking buddy and frequent fight partner. He stood up from the uncomfortable chair, then stopped. It occurred to him that he had a better chance of gathering information if he didn’t blunder in and attempt an almost certainly profoundly awkward reunion. Now that he thought about it, actually, he remembered that Berwald had been studying psychology. So that certainly tallied with the idea of Lukas being a little… strange. He listened attentively to their conversation, only able to pick out a few words. Berwald and Lukas had the worst possible voices for eavesdropping on: quiet, low in pitch and, in the Swede’s case, heavily accented. 

Once the two of them had gone into a room that was presumably Lukas’s bedroom, Mathias decided to do some detective work. The two rooms were adjoining and, pressing his ear against the wall, which seemed very thin, he found that he was able to just about listen in, although he could only discern a few scattered phrases here and there. Still, what he did pick up proved to be very intriguing, and its lack of completeness served only to deepen the mystery.  
“…Not your fault…” came Berwald’s voice.  
“… I could have…” Lukas protested, the rest of his words inaudible.  
A little later: “… Temporary measure… Better if…”  
This last seemed to have an effect on Lukas and Mathias listened with surprise as he heard him raise his voice for the first time since they’d met, all his words clear. “I’m not going back there. It’s always a ‘temporary measure’ and it doesn’t help me at all. It’s not a hospital, it’s a lunatic asylum!” Mathias reared back from the wall in shock. Suddenly, the strange neighbour’s words about ‘that place’ made sense. If Berwald wanted to ask him some questions, he would have a few of his own in return.

After that, there seemed to be nothing else for Lukas and Berwald to say to each other and Mathias returned to his position in front of the TV just in time for them to come out of the room. Lukas opened the living room door, ready to introduce him.  
“And this, Dr Oxenstierna, is my friend Mathias.”   
Mathias looked up on hearing his name and relished the look of surprise that momentarily flashed across Berwald’s face before he could compose himself again.  
“Ber!” he exclaimed with a broad smile, deciding that friendliness was the best way to get what he wanted. “I haven’t seen you in years. You got your PhD already, huh? Well, you were always a hard worker!”  
Lukas looked absolutely horrified. “You… know him?” he managed to choke out.  
“Hardly. We were at the same university.” Berwald said quickly, shooting Mathias a death glare. “And Lukas, if you wouldn’t mind leaving us for a moment, I need to talk to this friend of yours about a few things.”

Berwald had always been direct, but Mathias was nonetheless surprised when he asked him straight out:  
“What are you using Lukas for?”  
This again, Mathias thought. Another inevitable argument. “I’m not using him. We work together.” he replied defensively.  
Berwald sighed. “You say that, but Lukas considers you his friend. He obviously trusts you a lot. The question is whether you view him the same way.”  
Mathias clenched his fists. “He’s lying, don’t you see? You’re a psychologist and you can’t tell? He’s not my friend, not really, and he hardly trusts me. I don’t know anything about him and he won’t tell me.” He felt petulant, complaining like this, but he wasn’t used to his outgoing personality coming up against such steadfast opposition as it did with Lukas.  
“Mathias, he told me that you know about Emil. Well, what he hasn’t told you is that he thinks that it was his fault that Emil died. He’s lived with that guilt since he was nine.”  
Mathias took a deep breath, digesting the revelation. He hadn’t been expecting that. “What happened?” he asked.  
Berwald shook his head. “That’s not for me to say. All you need to know – really, it’s more than you need to know – is that he’s had a bad life. So don’t be taking advantage of him.”

When Berwald had left, Lukas shut the door behind him with a palpable air of relief. Mathias hovered by him, feeling like he had outstayed his welcome.  
“So, um, what was that about?” he asked casually, self-righteously deciding that he deserved an explanation.  
Lukas glared at him. “It doesn’t matter.”  
Ugh, Mathias thought, that anodyne phrase, that answer to everything. “It kind of does, actually,’ he replied, trying not to get angry. “I just spent half my Saturday being used as… whatever you were using me as. I don’t know, some kind of prop to make you look sane.”  
Lukas’s face darkened, his mouth forming an angry line. “Don’t talk about things you don’t know about.”  
Mathias felt himself losing his grip on his temper. “Well, maybe I would know about these things if you would just tell me about them! You can’t just drag me into your life and not tell me what I’m getting into.” He wasn’t quite shouting, but he was dangerously near.  
Lukas took a step closer to him and raised himself onto the balls of his feet so that they were almost level. “You would not be happy if I told you about my life, Mathias.”  
Mathias raked his fingers through his hair. “Stop this! Stop talking in riddles!”  
“No!” Lukas hissed through clenched teeth. “You stop. Stop thinking that, for whatever reason, you have a right to know about whatever you want. You don’t.”

The wind was harsh and Mathias’s thin jacket was no match for the needling cold of the gale. He was raging, though he didn’t know why. In his mind, he kept replaying his conversation with Berwald, then the one with Lukas. Co-conspirators, so they were, he brooded. They both knew something and weren’t telling him. And just when he thought he might have a chance with Lukas. It was Gilbert all over again, he thought angrily. Gilbert, who had made him think that they could actually end up somewhere and then had chosen Mathias’s own birthday party to introduce him to his girlfriend.  
“Hold on to me as long as I’m useful, then,’ he muttered fiercely. “Lead me on, keep me interested. Keep me hanging on. Then drop me when you don’t need me.” In his frustration, he punched the wall he was walking alongside. The pain was good, a vindication. He raised his bloodied knuckles to inspect them, then shoved both hands into his pockets, ignoring the sting. His mind was still on when Berwald had told him that Lukas blamed himself for whatever had happened to Emil. He didn’t care, not really. What he did care about was being used, having his good nature taken for granted. He could be vicious when he felt like it. And he most definitely felt like it now. So absorbed was he in his thoughts that he collided with a lamppost. Normally, he would have laughed. Instead, he kicked it savagely. “Fuck that.” he hissed out under his breath. God, he needed a drink.

One more, he thought. One more and you’ll forget his name. One more and that perfect little unblemished Athenian-statue pretty boy face will be out of your mind. Or maybe two more. Yeah, definitely two. He hadn’t got drunk in a while but now he was on a mission to be absolutely hammered. It was exactly what he needed. What was wrong with him, he thought miserably. He didn’t even normally go for the pretty, effeminate ones. Damn Lukas. Lukas, who was probably secretly a girl anyway.  
“You’ve had enough.” the barman said after his fifth, and he realised that he’d been talking out loud.  
“Yeah, and that’s why I need another drink.” he quipped bitterly.  
He got his sixth beer. He didn’t even taste it as it disappeared down his throat. He just wanted it for the wonderful anaesthetising qualities, for the blessed relief of being beyond thought. His anger at the world continued unabated. He needed to get in a fight or something, he decided. It just wasn’t fair that he, the one who always tried to be so cheerful, who always tried to smile, ended up being treated like something disposable. Who, then, could blame him for snapping once in a while?

He got his fight. A short little Swiss guy, whom he’d assumed would be an easy knockout. So much for that. He hardly felt the blows hitting him, that was how far under he was. He heard the crunch as they landed, but the pain never followed. Limping home with the dawn beginning to peek over the horizon, he reflected on the strangeness of his situation. Who, after all, would expect this affable, popular children’s author to be stumbling blind drunk out of a gay bar at six in the morning, bruised from a brawl and with his long-suppressed scowl no longer hidden under a smile?

…….

Havmann Island, 12th June 1830

Mathias was feeling more content than he had in a long time. The bare skeleton of his novel was beginning to take shape and the first sinews of plot and description were being added. He felt like a different person from the hack writer he’d been until so recently, as if he really had been reborn when he woke up on his first morning on the island. He sat in his window seat, looking over the sea that stretched all the way back to Stavanger and wondering if Lukas would come today. He knew by now what happened if a merperson stayed on land too long: their skin would dry out and they would lose the ability to breathe air. Effectively, they would drown on dry land, as Lukas had explained it to him. He had also said that, apart from deliberate killing, it was the only way a merperson could die. And so Mathias always knew that it was pointless trying to persuade Lukas to stay a little longer whenever he had to go back to the sea, because it was simply impossible. 

“You didn’t come down to the beach.”   
At the sound of Lukas’s voice, Mathias turned around eagerly, then felt the smile drop from his face as he saw the state of him. His white shirt was loose on him and open at the neck, showing a mess of fresh scratches across his chest, and there were bloody marks and cuts all up his arms.  
“My God! What happened to you?” he asked in horror, rushing over to inspect the damage.  
Lukas sighed. “I strayed from my usual territory to look for better fish and came across a few young mermen from my old group. They decided to punish me for what happened to Emil.” At the sight of Mathias’s shocked expression, he clarified, “They were never going to kill me, since that is a capital crime in our society, but they certainly wanted to show their displeasure. Nonetheless, the scratches will heal. They were pathetic, hardly breaking the skin.” At this last, he gave a wry smile.  
Mathias gestured for him to come over to the window seat and they sat together. “What was it that happened to Emil?” he found himself asking.  
“I’ll tell you one day,” Lukas said solemnly. “But it is my greatest shame and not something easily discussed. However, I will say this – he died, and although it was an accident, I cannot claim to blameless.”  
Mathias nodded slowly. “I see.” he murmured.  
“I understand if you want no more to do with me.” Lukas said sadly, as though already preparing himself to leave.  
“Stay. I’ve done a few things myself. I can’t judge you for an accident that happened years ago.” He stood up. “Do you want to look at some more books?” he asked with a smile, a promise to Lukas that his revelation had changed nothing between them.

The next half-hour or so passed in a dreamlike haze. Mathias had found a book of Greek stories, one he’d had since childhood, in among the volumes he’d packed in a hurry without really looking at them. Lukas was enthralled, particularly by the illustrations. Mathias was sad and appalled in equal measure that the merpeople could have no books. One story was about Odysseus and the sirens and he read it slowly, always looking up at Lukas to gauge his reaction to this portrayal of his… What was the word? Not ‘species’ - that was too remote and scientific. Maybe ‘kind’, his kind. Yes, that would do. As expected, Lukas’s expression gave away nothing. Once the story was over, Mathias tapped him gently on the shoulder.  
“Yes?” the merman said patiently, raising his dull eyes to meet Mathias’s vibrant ones.  
“What did you think of that?” Mathias asked eagerly.  
“There are no sirens,” Lukas informed him. “That is to say, there are no merpeople who specifically lure landmen to their death. We do sing, but we do it for own pleasure, not to kill people. Every merperson is blessed with a fine voice.”  
Mathias himself could barely carry a tune, and this information interested him. “Really? Will you sing for me?” he asked, never expecting the serious Lukas to agree.

Mathias sat on the floor, his eyes closed and a blissful smile on his lips as he faced the warm sun coming through the window. Lukas was singing to him. He really did have a beautiful voice, and the sweet notes washed over him like the most perfect sort of gentle rain. The sound was absolutely enthralling, like what he had imagined a siren’s song would sound like. There were no words that he could make out, but there was emotion, more emotion than Lukas would give away in his face or speech. The music made his heart beat faster and heat run through his body. He clasped his hands together to give them something to do. He half-opened one eye, hazily watching Lukas sitting in the windowseat, his own eyes shut as he summoned the glorious tune out of the depths of his soul, or so it sounded to Mathias. He let himself be lost in the music again and contemplate the unavoidable: he had fallen in love with Lukas.

Once the song had come to an end, Mathias looked up at Lukas and felt his whole body tingle with desire.  
“That was perfect.” he said reverently, his writer’s stock of adjectives having been discarded in favour of the simple, unadorned truth.  
Lukas blushed, the first time Mathias had seen him do so, and fiddled with the cuffs of his borrowed shirt. “It was a love song. I never had it sung to me, but I heard it once or twice as a child.”  
Mathias felt his throat tighten and swallowed. “You mean… You love me?” he asked tentatively. “But what about losing my heart? And yours? What will happen to us?”  
“What it means, Mathias,” Lukas began to explain. “Is that once we fall in love with each other, we can never love anyone else. You could meet someone the day after falling in love with a merman and the person you meet could be your true love but you would never be able to be with that person because you were promised to a man of the sea. And because you, Mathias, are not one of the sea, you may well find yourself leading a lonely life when we two are apart but you can have no one else.”  
Mathias mulled the information over. It made sense, he supposed. It was like a lot of the old stories, the idea of a binding promise made in haste because of its fleeting attraction, only for it to later be the undoing of one or other of the characters. But, because of his predilections, he had nothing to lose.  
“I do not know what is considered right in the society of the merpeople, but on land it is forbidden for men to love men. And I am a lover of men, so losing my heart to you is no worse than falling for any of the men on land. Neither love could last, but I would rather have passing joy than none at all.” he said earnestly.

He went over to the windowseat and knelt beside it, taking Lukas’s hands in his.  
“Do you see?” he asked gently. “I would rather have you, havmann, than any of the others on land.” He reached up and cupped Lukas’s face, stroking the smooth cheek with a gentle thumb. “So beautiful.” he whispered adoringly, his voice soft and loving. He raised his other hand and with it pushed the falling strands of hair back from Lukas’s forehead. Gently, but with underlying urgency, he moved a few inches forward, so that their lips were almost touching. “With your permission.” he said with a trace of his old high-society elegance.  
Lukas gave a rare, genuine smile. “I give it freely.” he said in a teasing voice that made Mathias love him even more. He closed the gap between them, meeting Lukas’s soft lips and finding them a perfect match for his own. They tasted of salt, that peculiar type of salt that is specific to the sea, and they were a reminder that even as they loved each other they would soon be parted. When they finally broke apart, they sought out each other’s eyes, each one seeing the love boldly written there.  
“Havmann.” Mathias murmured reverently, as though invoking a great deity.  
“Landman.”  
“Lukas.”  
“Mathias.”  
He took Lukas’s hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it as he had so often done to girls at parties. “I love you.” he said, voice choked by love. “And I could not have lost my heart to anyone better.”


	8. Misery and Truth

Copenhagen, 13th February 2013

Mathias woke slowly, the events of the previous night returning to him in dribs and drabs as he forced his tired eyes open and sat up. It had certainly left its mark on him. His head was stuffy and sore, sending a fresh dart of pain streaking across his vision every time he moved. There was a sick yet empty feeling in the pit of his stomach and his mouth was dry and vile-tasting. He pulled up his shirt and saw the blackberry-dark bruises from his fight spread across his chest. He pressed them with a hesitant finger and found them still painful. He couldn't remember if he'd won or not, nor what he'd done to his opponent. The self-inflicted cuts across his knuckles had scabbed over, yellowish. And yet, he mused, was he really the one who deserved such punishment?

Lukas, he thought sourly. Lukas, who acted so high and mighty but who wasn't above manipulating fools like Mathias. That was what you got for being nice, he supposed. And it was all because of Lukas that he was in this state. God, why couldn't he have just gone with one of those illustrators who made the pretty pictures? If only he wasn't always so desperate to be different, his fear of obscurity making him preoccupied with individuality. And yet Mathias knew he could never have brought himself to turn the full force of his temper on Lukas. Violence was something to be meted out to nameless strangers, undistinguishable sacks of bones and organs that accepted his misdirected fury uncomplainingly for the chance to land a few hits of their own. No, to him Lukas was a rare and exquisite bird – beautiful and uncommon but so delicate, able to be crushed with a single touch, bones and feathers yielding to the brute strength of human cruelty. He stood up, wincing as his beaten body protested at the movement, and went to shower, wanting to rid himself of every trace of the night before.

Once he had washed, shaved, dressed and generally made himself look like an upstanding member of society once more, he decided to go and read in order to cool off. He chose his favourite book, that last great unfinished work of his inspiration, the first Mathias. Its place in the bookcases was as familiar to him as his own name, and it stood nestled among his other classics, the novels he knew in his heart that his own meagre talent would never equal. The volume slipped easily off the shelf as it had done so many times before, just the right thickness to be clasped in one hand. He sat in the armchair that he'd found at an auction and christened his 'reading chair' and for a moment simply studied the unopened book. He loved this moment of potential just before starting to read something new, when he looked down at the cover and wondered how this book would change or challenge him, if it would inspire frighteningly intense feelings or leave him dead. Any book, he reflected, could well be the one to change his life, and every book could change someone's life.

He still remembered the first time he had opened this one, still remembered turning the title page to see the text and slowly reading the first sentence: There was always more wine. What a majestic opening, he mused. Had ever a single line better captured the oxymoronic misery of a life of pleasure? He had fallen in love with the book with that sentence, had stayed up all night reading it and had experienced a genuine sense of physical discomfort at the suddenness of the ending – only it wasn't the ending, but what his predecessor had managed to write before his untimely death. The last sentence was like a freshly-cut twig, almost disgusting in its bareness, still wet with the sap of its creator's fertile branching mind. They found him to be mad, and mocked him, and those whose lives were spent cultivating appearances ridiculed one who was bold enough to show his face unmasked and unadorned. And that was it. No resolution or conclusion, no demonstration of how the characters had changed for better or worse over the course of the book and no villain to get their comeuppance. And Mathias, who had once raged impotently at the frustratingly unfinished story, had come to realise that perhaps there could never be an ending to equal the premise. The villain, after all, was society itself, the one that the previous Mathias himself had known in 1830 but one that could equally be modern day and as such there could be no defeat for this villain because normative society remained at large and undefeated. Perhaps now a hero like the Lukas in the novel could thrive, but not in the first Mathias's time, and even now people could be less than understanding towards those who defied classification.

And was it not yet another coincidence in their two lives, Mathias thought, that the strange yet fascinating young man in the novel was called Lukas? According to the critical notes, none of the first Mathias's known contemporaries matched the description of him, and therein lay the problem, for the man was so perfectly drawn that he could not have come from the imagination. Who could simply have dreamt up eyes like lapis lazuli stones, hair like the froth of the sea and pure moonlight-white skin? Who could have created a smile dazzling in its rarity, a singing voice that could slice through the stillness of the air and small hands that carried the strength of a far larger man? It was, the literature scholars had said, as if the writer had been in love with his character. But the last time the book had been subjected to any detailed analysis had been in the 1920s, and back then such thoughts were not countenanced. They would not dare desecrate the searing masterpiece with allegations of things as distasteful as a man's desire for another man. Mathias smiled to himself, understanding what his predecessor had been doing. It was ingenious really – he had mocked a whole society while using someone who was not supposed to exist as his mouthpiece. It was a great and devastating joke, one made at the expense of everyone he had known and hated. What astonishing brilliance, Mathias thought. His mind drifted to his own Lukas, just as beautiful and unknowable as the one in the book and really as unreachable as if he too had been crafted out of ink.

He stayed staring at the last page for a long time, mind a long way off, then closed the book with an air of finality. He had come to a decision, one that he hoped he would have no cause to regret. He saw now that he and Lukas had both been wrong, that he should not have demanded to know things that were clearly causing Lukas unhappiness and that Lukas should not have asked him to do things for him if he didn't trust him to know the reason. So he had decided that he would go and visit Lukas, tell him what he thought and see how things turned out. He wanted to get to know him better, to forget how he had raged against him while staring into the bleakness of a beer glass and cutting a sad figure, an unfulfilled man in thrall to one he barely understood. He looked at the clock. It was coming up for four in the afternoon. He'd slept for longer than he'd thought. He'd slept enough, avoided his problems enough. Wasn't that what he was always telling children, after all? Be brave, be strong, and if someone upsets you, stand up for yourself. It was time that he followed his own advice. Drunkenness was a refuge for fools, an escape from thought, and he wanted to be free of it.

Mathias shivered in the draughty corridor as he waited for Lukas to answer the door. In one gloved hand, he clutched a bag containing a book of seascape paintings, a peace offering. He could only hope that it would be accepted. He knocked again and felt relieved as he heard Lukas's footsteps in the hall, getting louder as they approached. The door swung open.

"What do you want? Did you leave something behind?" Lukas's voice was tight, heavy with unrevealed emotion and betrayed no surprise at Mathias's arrival. He looked a wreck, his hair sticking up and his eyes red. His clothes clearly hadn't been ironed.

Mathias cleared his throat. "No, I… er… I'm sorry about yesterday. I shouldn't have said all those things." He gestured to his bag. "I… um… I got you something. To apologise." Gratefully, he saw that Lukas's severe expression was softening slightly and handed over the bag.

Lukas took it and peered inside. "Oh, I know this artist. Thank you." he said, as close to happily as he was ever going to get. He looked up at Mathias. "Do you want a coffee?"

Mathias was speechless. Had Lukas really just invited him in? "Um… Yeah, ok. If it's no trouble."

Lukas shook his head. "I'm going away tomorrow so I'm trying to use things up before I leave."

The first thing Mathias noticed on entering the flat was the suitcases piled up in the hall with the neatness that he was beginning to see that Lukas employed as a form of artifice. He had a sneaking suspicion that the artist wasn't going away for a holiday.

"So, where are you off to then? London? Paris? New York?" he asked cheerfully, in a way that allowed Lukas to shrug off the question if he wanted to.

Lukas shook his head. "None of those." he said softly. He led Mathias into the small but neat kitchen, various varieties of coffee lined up along the shelves and worktops and several empty cups on the table. He went over to the pot and started making up two cups without asking Mathias what he wanted, leading the writer to suppose that he'd be having a plain black. The silence was oppressive, the air full of unspoken things.

"Lukas?" Mathias said hesitantly. He received no answer but pressed on anyway. "I… just wanted to say that I didn't mean to upset you yesterday. If you don't want to tell me anything, you don't have to." He paused for a moment. "But I was kind of confused about what was happening yesterday." Lukas had his back to him but Mathias still saw how he tensed up, how he snatched himself back into his shell.

"It's alright."

All at once, Mathias was filled with a desire to put a stop to this secrecy. Lukas was struggling, that much was obvious. "Lukas, I know we don't know each other very well but I don't want you to be sad. I'm a little worried about you, actually."

Lukas turned to face him, crossing his arms. "It's not your job to be worried about me. I have people paid to do that." he said defensively.

Mathias found himself becoming as flustered as he always did when faced with such iciness. "I know but… I mean as a friend. You… I… I got drunk yesterday because I didn't know what else to do. I was frustrated and I didn't know if I should blame you or myself or the world."

"That would explain the bruise." Lukas remarked, the faintest trace of amusement in his voice.

Too late, Mathias remembered the blooming banner of shame across his left cheek. "Oh, right. That. Yeah, I got in a fight."

Lukas came over and sat across from him at the plain wooden table. It was too small for two to sit comfortably, and they found themselves awkwardly close together.

"Listen, Mathias," he said slowly, forming the thoughts on his lips rather than in his mind. "I don't have many friends. In fact, I don't have any at all. You're the first person to take an interest in me who isn't being paid for it – and even then we wouldn't have met without our work." He sighed, steeling himself to go on. "Mathias, I do want you to know the truth about me because I don't think I've treated you very well up to now. I know you think I'm not quite right."

Mathias opened his mouth to protest, even though Lukas had surmised correctly. Unable to think of something convincing to say, he settled for looking shocked, as though the idea of Lukas being a little strange had never even crossed his mind.

Lukas held up his hand, pre-emptively silencing the unarticulated argument. "And you're right in thinking that. I do have something wrong with me. I do have a problem." He looked nervously at Mathias, who gave him a reassuring nod, a signal to go on. "I have somniphobia." he said at last, in a confessional tone.

Mathias had never heard of it, but was relieved that Lukas's condition had a label, that it was something definite and known. "What's that?" he asked, trying not to sound flippant.

"Fear of sleep," Lukas explained, his voice weak with the effort of holding back tears. Mathias could see how much it was taking out of him to reveal this information. "I can't sleep. I never sleep because I… I have the most terrible nightmares. That's why I drink all that coffee. I'll do anything to stay awake."

Mathias was stunned, fruitlessly casting around for something to say. "Oh. I'm sorry." he said pathetically.

Lukas shook his head. "Don't be. It's nothing more than I deserve." He gave a wry smile. "It's my punishment, you see."

Mathias couldn't help but ask. "Is this to do with Emil?"

Lukas tapped his fingers against the table and stared off into the distance, seeming to consider the question. "Yes, it is. And since you, Mathias, are the only person who hasn't had a chance to judge me on what I've done, I suppose it's only fair that I should tell you the whole story."

...

Havmann Island, 19th July 1830

At the start of his self-imposed exile, Mathias had wondered whether he would last the year or if he would be mad or dead long before it reached its end. Now, however, it was flitting by with awful speed. The long, loving, languid days had begun to blur together into an endless sequence of sweet moments snatched with Lukas before the sea drew him back as it always did. He had never been so happy, nor so satisfied. He had never had such freedom to express love and knew that, in human society, he never would have. But there was one thing that still hurt him. It was the knowledge that Lukas could never truly be his, that he would wake to find himself alone and Lukas gone to sea again, the only evidence he had ever been there in the flesh and not a dream Mathias's wonderful memories of the night before. Some days, he would fail to appear at all and Mathias would spend hours sitting at the window, pen dangling from his limp hand as he struggled to bring his excoriating novel to its fruition. And even when Lukas was with him, there were a thousand reminders that he was a thing of the sea: the storm-wave blue of his eyes, the creamy sea-foam gold of his hair, the hint of salt always on his soft lips.

Those times, the times when Mathias was overwhelmed with the realisation that he and Lukas could never be fully together, were the reason why he still had a neat row of small glass bottles above his bed. Lukas had seen them, questions plain in his eyes, but Mathias had shown without words that he wouldn't be telling him what they were anytime soon. Lukas had his secret of Emil and Mathias had his laudanum. Despite all that they had given each other, more than they had ever given to anyone else, they were each keeping back this final thing, this last remnant of themselves before love and intimacy rendered them two halves of one rather than two indviduals. But it was becoming harder for him to swallow the drug, guilt tightening his throat and choking him whenever he tried to take a drop. The voice in his head would ask him why he was doing it, what more it would take for him to be happy when he already had Lukas. It was so different from his days as a high society rake when he'd taken it with impunity because everyone was doing it and those that weren't didn't need artificial happiness and were to be envied. He had always told himself that it wasn't an admission of weakness but a way to build up his strength. But now he wasn't sure whether he wanted to carry on dulling his sensations like this. He decided then, sitting at the rickety wooden desk in his windswept house, his elbows on the table and his mind on Lukas, that he would tell his lover about his pathetic vice and see what Lukas thought of him then.

He smiled faintly to himself, pleased to have reached such a resolution, and picked up his pencil to continue with his next chapter. It was the moment where his protagonist, Lukas, had just begun his descent into madness, driven to it by people's refusals to believe his stories of mythical creatures and the doubt that he himself was beginning to feel. He wondered then what might be done for him, for a man in the full blossom and beauty of youth whose mind was tortured and invaded by things he knew were real but at the same time knew should not be so. At night, his vision would be crowded by strange things, things such as...

The door creaked open and Mathias looked up, smiling widely when he saw Lukas there for the first time in several days. He jumped eagerly out of his chair and embraced him tightly.

"My love." he said simply, needing no more words. He leaned forward for their customary kiss, but found that Lukas was unresponsive, stiffening in his arms. Concerned, he stepped back to study Lukas's face and saw that something was amiss.

"What's wrong, sweet?" he asked, looping his arms around his slim waist.

Lukas sighed, pulling away from Mathias's hold. "Nothing." he said unconvincingly, looking off to the side.

Mathias didn't want to press him, knowing that he was so reserved, but he didn't like to see his love unhappy. "I know there's something, sweetheart. I can see it in your face. You can tell me." he reassured him.

Lukas shook his head. "I don't want you to think badly of me." he admitted.

"I could never think badly of you." Mathias protested.

"Only because you don't know what I did. It's not right that you've loved me without knowing what happened to Emil." Lukas said defiantly.

"Tell me, and I promise I won't judge you for it."

They sat together in the windowseat, their customary place, as Lukas prepared to tell the story of Emil. Mathias began to feel trepidation, wondering if he really would be able to refrain from judgment as he had promised. He could feel Lukas's hand in his, cold and slightly damp, and he gave it a squeeze. Lukas didn't object to this contact, made as it was from a desire to comfort rather than any other form of love.

"As a child, I had few friends," Lukas said, beginning his story. "Because I was not like the others. Some were jealous that I could go on land, and others found it frightening. Nevertheless, there was always one boy who enjoyed my company, and that was Emil. He was two years younger than me and I fancied myself his older brother, since both of us were the only children of our parents." He paused and took a deep breath, anguish clear on his face. "Whenever I went on the land, I brought things back for him – a pretty stone or a feather from a bird, that sort of thing – and he became curious. He wanted to see more of the land but I told him that it was too dangerous for him, that only I could leave the water. One day, though, we were exploring away from the group, since the other children tended not to let us play with them. We saw a boat, something very rare here, and while I was afraid of the landmen, Emil wanted to go and see. So I let him. We both swam up to the surface but I stayed just under while he went above. I was a coward, too scared to go with him and protect him. And they shot him."

Mathias was jolted out of his story-listening trance. He turned to Lukas and saw that his eyes were gleaming with unshed tears. At some point, their hands had slipped apart. "What do you mean?" he asked.

Lukas sniffed, trying to collect himself. "They shot him, Mathias! The landmen shot him. He was a little boy! He was seven years old and they killed him because they had never seen a merchild before." He closed his eyes, remembering. "He was bleeding so much. I didn't know what to do. I was terrified. He died right in front of me, and it was my fault. If I hadn't been his friend, if I hadn't whetted his appetite for land things, if I hadn't let him go up that day then he'd still be alive." His voice was frantic, his words spilling out in a disordered mess as he unburdened himself.

"It wasn't your fault," Mathias whispered soothingly as he stroked his hair, even though in his heart he was conflicted, unsure of what to think. "It was the sailors who killed him, not you."

Lukas squirmed away from the touch. "It was my fault. He was younger than me. He didn't know better. And now don't you see my trouble, Mathias? I led him to his death at the hands of the landmen and here I am now, not only alive but consorting with one of them. I am the lover of a landman when it was landmen who killed Emil." He shook his head, something having just occurred to him. "No, it was me who killed him. He was dead from the moment I met him. I told you nothing good could come of a union of land and sea."

Mathias made another attempt at calming him, reaching out to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "Lukas, you were a child. You're acting as if you murdered him in cold blood. You shouldn't have done what you did, but all children are silly. You were just unlucky that your particular mistake had such consequences."

Lukas stood up, brushing his hand away. He pulled up his sleeve to show a fresh lacing of scratches, a lot deeper than before. "Every time I see another merperson, Mathias, they punish me again, and rightly so. We are supposed to live for centuries and yet Emil had only seven short years. Even for you landmen, a life of only seven years is a tragedy. You are wrong to think that everything can be solved with kisses and sweet words and I was wrong to believe it for so long. I should never have gone with you. I do not deserve love. I do not deserve to be alive." His voice was dull and devoid of the desperate emotion with which it had so recently been imbued.

"Please, Lukas, I…"

"Stop." Lukas commanded, turning away and leaving. He paused in the doorway. "Don't come after me. And don't wait for me either. We can never meet again, for your good and my punishment." Then, he slipped out and disappeared down the hill, away to the sea where Mathias could not follow.

Mathias struggled to digest the new information, his mind in turmoil. He would never have expected that out of Lukas. Really, he reflected, he didn't know Lukas at all. But the idea of never seeing him again was a terrible thought, and he truly hoped that Lukas would rethink his decision and return to him. If not, his novel would be uncompleted without a muse, and without a muse to elevate him above the usual level of louche young men, Mathias found that his life was worth very little. He pressed a hand to his forehead, feeling a headache beginning. Too much to think about, he realised. With a bitter laugh at his own expense, he reached for his laudanum bottle. Just as well he'd kept this last secret to himself.


	9. Revelations

Copenhagen, 13th February 2013

In the moment after Lukas had spoken, there was perfect calmness. The table was like a still life, their cups casting subtle grey shadows in the white winter light.

"You don't have to do this." Mathias said.

Lukas shook his head. "I do. I will. I've decided." he said resolutely. "Just… promise me you won't judge until you've heard everything."

"I promise." Mathias replied. The air was charged.

Lukas began his story. "My parents had quite a bit of money,' he said, not looking up from his own clasped hands. "And they owned four cottages by the sea. We lived in one and rented out the other three. They were at least two hundred years old – I remember the wall above my bed had 'M.K., 1812' carved into it. Anyway, it was a nice place to live, but I was lonely. I was an only child and the only people who rented the cottages were single people or couples – never families. That all changed the summer I was nine. A family finally came all the way from Iceland and took the place next door to ours. The best part was that they had a little boy. That was Emil. He was an only child like me, so we sort of naturally came together, he was half-Norwegian so we spoke the same language and best of all he was two years younger. I'd always wanted to be a big brother and now here was my chance." He broke off.

"Are you…" Mathias began to ask.

"I'm alright," Lukas said with a hint of irritation. He stood up. "But I want to show you something important. It's part of the story."

Lukas slipped out of the room, leaving Mathias alone with his thoughts. He could feel a growing sense of foreboding. There was something almost like a horror story in the way Lukas was telling what had happened – a perfectly innocuous, even happy, beginning – then what? He wondered what he'd got himself into, but knew he had become too deeply involved to beat a retreat.

Lukas returned a few moments later, clutching a book under his arm. He placed it on the table and slid it towards Mathias. "Have a look." he said softly. It was not an order but a request, a plea to understand. Mathias took it, studying the cover. It was rough imitation leather, designed to look like an old ship's logbook. The book was fastened with a bow and had its title, The Young Explorer's Guide to Magical Creatures, picked out in gold lettering. Mathias undid the bow and opened it carefully, turning the thick pages. Each one had an exquisite drawing of one of the creatures, along with an explanation about it made to look as if it was handwritten. He closed it and gave it back to Lukas, feeling somehow like he'd seen something he wasn't supposed to.

"I got that for my ninth birthday," Lukas explained. "My parents thought it would get me out of the house a bit but I never even looked at it until Emil came. We were playing around in my room one day when he spotted it on the shelf and we decided to use it." His face crumpled.

"Lukas…"

Lukas ignored him. "Alright," he whispered to himself. "It's alright." Mathias saw the small motion as he swallowed. He sniffed a few times, then swallowed again and continued with his story, his voice slightly blurred by barely-contained tears. "We spent a few days in the forest, looking for fairies, but then I had a better idea. I remembered learning a poem about a siren at school and wondered if there were mermaids in the sea just off where I lived. So I made a plan. I stole the keys to our boathouse and then, one morning, me and Emil told our parents that we were going to the beach. Instead, I took the boat out and we went off together." He looked down into his coffee cup and, finding it empty, pushed it away.

"It was a rowing boat but I'd had a go at controlling it before – though never alone – and so I thought everything would be fine. I remember seeing the clouds on the horizon but not being too worried. I'd never been on the water in a storm before. I'd seen its power but never experienced it. I remember how I was rowing and Emil was sort of draped over the back – I put him on 'mermaid watch'. I was absolutely certain we'd see some. Soon the storm rushed in. Emil was really scared. He asked if we should go back and I said no, it would all be over soon. Really, I wanted to impress him. I wanted to show how I could deal with anything. And then the rain started, and the wind just went from a breeze to a gale – just like that." He snapped his fingers. "I couldn't control it in such bad weather. We were driven onto rocks. I remember Emil screaming and me just shouting 'I don't know what to do!' over and over again, as if it would suddenly come to me. The boat was broken up. I managed to keep hold of a piece of wood and I was too cold and too wet and too scared to really notice what was happening. When I looked up next, Emil was gone."

Mathias tried not to let his shock show on his face. "That's awful." he said lamely, attempting to coat his shock with sympathy. Really, he had no idea of what to say.

Lukas went on. The floodgates had opened and now every last recollection was pouring out of him. "I couldn't possibly say how long I was there. I thought I was dying. I couldn't even lift my head up, that's how heavy the rain was. And then there came a lifeboat. I suppose our parents must have seen the missing boat and realised what we were doing. I remember being picked up and them asking if I knew my name, where I lived, if I was in pain. As soon as I was out of the water, I sort of came to life. I screamed and screamed. I kept yelling 'you have to go back! My friend's still out there!' But they never did. I suppose they knew it was far too late. I blacked out after that." he finished bleakly.

Mathias realised that he was waiting for a response. "I'm so sorry. I had no idea. If I'd known, I wouldn't have asked." He was babbling and they both knew it.

"If you'd known, you wouldn't have had to ask." Lukas said sharply. "And don't you dare say it wasn't my fault. I was supposed to be responsible. I was supposed to be the older one. And all I did was lead him to his death, make him go out when he didn't want to, then refuse to go back when he asked me. When he begged me. You know Mathias," he said with a twist of black humour, "the thing I will never forget is that poem that inspired me to go out that day, the last two lines of it. With his last rites unsaid and him unmourned/ He drowns, unbaptised, in the sea-foam font. I've always thought, ever since that day, that those words were a prophecy, that they were a warning of what Emil would suffer."

Mathias saw, for the first time, just how far down into misery Lukas had sunk. The guilt really had destroyed him. He reached out a comforting hand, but it was not taken. "Lukas, I don't understand. I…"

"Don't try to understand," Lukas commanded him. "Let it be enough that I did something terrible, and the guilt of it has sent me mad. Mad enough to be locked up, in fact. I'm not going away on holiday, Mathias, I can tell you."

His tears of earlier seemed to have dried up for the moment, hidden under his usual cold reserve, but Mathias didn't want to abandon him, not now. "Can you have visitors?"

Lukas scoffed. "Partners and family only. And my family pretty well gave up on me after it became obvious this whole madness thing wasn't going to be a passing phase."

"Can I call you?"

Lukas raised an eyebrow. "You really still want to talk to me?" he asked in disbelief.

Mathias took out his notepad and began scribbling down his number. "Of course I do," he replied. "You trusted me. I need to repay that somehow."

Lukas stuffed the piece of paper in his pocket. "Well, alright then. I'll see if I get time." He said no more, and Mathias sensed that it was time to leave.

Mathias hardly knew where he was going as he began his walk home. His mind was buzzing with what he had just learnt, conflicting thoughts fighting for dominance. Poor Lukas, to have suffered so much and still be suffering. Poor Emil, the drowned boy. The story had been horrifying and tragic in equal measure, one of those dreadful death-in-childhood tearjerkers that dominated the middle-market papers along with photos and flowers and testimonies from devastated parents, crying classmates and anyone who had known them, all saying how the poor child had been so happy, so popular, so loved and so full of potential. You never heard the side of the child who'd survived, the life-changing and perhaps life-ending guilt that that entailed. Well, Mathias had seen that first-hand now, and he decided that he would help Lukas in any way he could. And yet he found the faintest, vaguest possible idea of a story beginning to take shape. It wasn't quite ready for show yet, but he would have to show it to Lukas when the time was right, and ask if he would maybe provide some drawings for it. As soon as he got home, he decided, he would open up his notepad and write a new title for his new work: Between Sea and Shore.

….

Havmann Island, 20th July 1830

He had taken too much again. The laudanum had taken him prisoner, paralysed him, tied him down and forced him to watch while a horrific parade of dreams flickered through his vision. It was as if some malicious creature was inside his mind, rooting out his most traumatic experiences and displaying them to him as he fought vainly to be free of the drug's hold on him – but, of course, there was no creature, only his own too-fertile imagination. He dreamed of something that had not yet happened. In his dream, he was under the sea, disorientated, the water a uniform blurry blue wherever he turned. He was lost, and the air was spilling out of his lungs in delicate pearl-like bubbles. He could feel himself drowning, and his pounding heart sped up even further at this, his childhood terror. He had always feared drowning, and always had a strange feeling that he would meet his death in water. And the dream, this dream of death, had felt just as real as his memories.

And then, just as his desperate lungs were about to take in a salty flood, as his vision burned red and his head felt about to explode, he woke from his dream, the rush of water ringing in his ears and his memories of the previous day returning as the drug trickled away, its power all spent for the moment. He remembered, with a stab of pain that almost had him reaching for the bottle again, what had passed between him and Lukas. We can never meet again, Lukas had said. But they had to meet again. He knew that if he had to spend the rest of the year alone, he would never survive it. Lukas was part of him now, as the warning had said – lose your heart and never get it back. And he knew he would never get it back, that it would always belong with Lukas. If only Lukas didn't blame himself for what, to an external observer, was so clearly an accident. If only… what?

Mathias wondered when his unhappiness had begun, if it had been the first time he had fallen in love with a boy and run away, his cheeks flaming and a desperate voice in his head, chanting, don't tell anyone, you can't tell anyone, it's a secret, it'll go away. Of course, it never had. Or maybe when he had first begun to write and found that the wonderful masterpieces he had longed to write would never appear, that all that would ever flow from his pen was predictable and mediocre wit. Perhaps it had been when he first looked at himself, truly and properly, and saw that he was as sad and shallow as the people he had once pitied. Or perhaps it had been when he had first bought a small glass bottle, stoppered with a cork, and slipped it into his coat pocket. Perhaps it had been that same evening, sitting on his bed and turning the vial over in his hands, watching the liquid inside slosh and bubble with the movement. Perhaps it had been when he pulled the stopper out, breathed in the vaguely sweet scent, and poured a drop onto his tongue. Perhaps it had been when he acknowledged that this opiated state was the closest he could ever come to satisfaction.

He stood up slowly, brushing a few of the wrinkles out of his clothes. He had to find Lukas, to tell him that nothing could ever change the love he felt for him. He had to show him that he couldn't live without him, for he was his muse, his beauty, his true love. His cynical inner voice told him that there was no hope, that Lukas was forever lost to him, but his braver heart whispered that there was a chance to win him back. He had to win him back. There was no way he could live without those soft lips, that sweet voice, the aquatic coolness of his skin… He could have gone on listing the things he loved about Lukas forever. And it was for this reason that he would go in search of him and show him, through whatever means necessary, that he had never loved anyone in the way he loved him.

Mathias paused just outside his house, at the crest of the hill, and stared down onto the beach. It was already late afternoon, and the light from the sun that was just beginning to set had taken on a sepia tint. The air was very still, untroubled by the usual winds that tore in from the vast and open sea. He began to walk down to the sands, his shoes clicking against the rocks as he descended. The island seemed almost to be full of living things, waiting just out of sight, as though he were under observation. He came to the beach and stopped there, watching the waves rush in and out, remembering how as a child he had feared they would take him with them. He remembered one summer when his family had stayed in a seaside cottage in Norway. His room had overlooked the sea and the constant slap of the water against the rocks had frightened him so much that he had carved his initials and the year above his bed, so that if he was washed away by a freak wave, there would be some mark of his existence.

He was brought out of his meandering memory by a sound that climbed above the waves and hovered in the air, a voice he knew so well. A voice singing a song to break his heart. It was Lukas. He turned towards the source of the noise and began to follow it, moving as quietly as he had the day he had first encountered Lukas, when he had been so terrified and so anxious not to startle him for fear that the creature, as he then knew him, would be violent. Lukas had never again shown him that look of fury he had on the day of their first meeting. Perhaps it had been his own expression of fear.

When he came across Lukas, sitting on his usual rock, Mathias felt a jolt of something not being quite usual, and it took him a moment to see what it was. Lukas still had his tail on, a long gleaming thing of shining blue. It caught the light, sparking and flashing a thousand different ways, no scale quite the same colour as another. His breath caught in his throat and for a moment, a tiny instant, he saw why the fishermen had shot Emil. Who, after all, would not want to lay claim to such magical beauty? The song continued, wordless like all the others, but desperately sad, a plangent sound of unrestrained misery, pain and shame and regret all mingling into a single, artfully formless melody. Mathias stepped forward,

"Lukas." he said, breaking the spell. Lukas turned around and Mathias feared for a moment that he would slip away into the sea again, back to the unknown depths. Instead, he spoke.

"I told you we could never see each other again, Mathias." he said, in the voice of a dead man. He seemed oddly unsurprised to see him, resigned to the fact that Mathias would always be in pursuit wherever he went.

Mathias took a step closer. "Lukas, please, listen to me," he implored, holding his hands out in a gesture of appeal. "You've punished yourself enough. I'll say it again: it wasn't your fault that Emil died. It was just one of those cruel tricks of fate. You can no more blame yourself for what happened than you can blame the sky for raining. It was something that happened, and while it was a sad thing, it was the fault of the men who killed him, not you." He looked at Lukas's face, still blank and unyielding. "Do you see?" he implored in a softer tone, coming even closer. They were now near enough to touch, and the writer's corner of Mathias's mind marvelled at the raw power in evidence in the form of the fishtail. He had never expected it to appear so natural when coupled with a human body.

Lukas sighed. "I have often thought the same things as you, Mathias, but I have… never been able to bring myself to examine them to see if they contain any truth. Since yesterday, I have been awake and restless. I wondered if I had done right to tell you what I did."

"Lukas, you didn't do anything." Mathias protested.

Lukas continued. "When I told you, I saw the pity in your eyes. I left before I had to see it turn to revulsion."

Mathias reached up to the rock and seized Lukas's hand. "My heart, my darling, my truest, truest love," he said desperately. "I would never have felt revulsion. If you had taken a knife to someone, well now, that would have been another matter, but to hate yourself for a childhood mistake is tantamount to madness. And I still love you. I still love you more than I have ever loved anyone else." He paused. "The question now is if you can forgive yourself."

Lukas considered for a moment. "Not immediately," he said at length. "Nor completely. But perhaps it will be less of a constant pain and more of an old wound."

Mathias smiled. "Precisely what I wanted to hear." he said with an air of satisfaction.

They lapsed into contented mutual solitude for a few minutes. Mathias occupied himself by skimming stones across the water, with very little success, and Lukas took up his song again. Mathias desperately wanted to know the meaning behind it but knew better than to pry.

After a while, Lukas spoke again. "Mathias," he said thoughtfully. "I have seen your home so many times, but you have never seen mine."

Mathias knew where the conversation was going, and felt a stab of fear. He was by no means as frightened of water as he had been in his youth, but going under it was something else entirely. But he was embarrassed to admit it, and there was no guarantee that the sea-dwelling Lukas would understand. "No, I never have." he replied carefully.

"I would like to show you."

Mathias was powerless to resist.

He couldn't breathe. He could barely see. All sounds were warped and distorted, although there wasn't much to hear so far under the water. Oh God, how far down were they? The salt stung his eyes, seeped into every orifice. He couldn't breathe. He was going to die. If only Lukas would let go of him for a moment, then he would be free. But the strength in those thin arms bound the two of them together. Lukas could swim. Lukas could see underwater. But most of all, he could breathe. Mathias couldn't breathe. And he was going to die. The pain in his starved, screaming lungs and brain was unbearable. He was dying. Forget the future tense, it was happening. He could feel it happening. He struggled, fighting the hold Lukas had on him. Lukas was in his own world, a world away from Mathias. With his last vestige of strength, he managed to pull away, and ungracefully haul himself to the surface. He broke through it and took in several great, heaving breaths, coughing up litres of water he hadn't even known he had swallowed. The water stung his eyes, poured down his face, pulled insistently at his feet to drag him down once more. After a moment of this torture, Lukas too resurfaced, concern and fear plain on his face.

"Mathias? What happened to you?"

Mathias reached out for Lukas's hand to keep him afloat. The tail spiralled away beneath them, merging with the water so that its winking and shining was indistinguishable. He coughed a few times more, his throat raw. "I couldn't breathe. Or see. Or talk." he said, the terror coming back to him as he recounted it. "And… You're so strong. I couldn't get free. I thought I was dying."

Lukas looked down in shame. "I am sorry," he said sincerely. "Sometimes, we forget that landmen are different from us. I was so… at home in the water that I forgot you were not. I hardly noticed you fighting to be free. Maybe," he mused. "That is the origin of the legend of the sirens – beautiful women who never mean to harm but do so because they forget their lovers are not like them."

Mathias nodded. "Maybe, but you must understand, I have always had a fear of drowning. As a child, I was convinced that I would die in the water. There was a poem my teacher used to read us, about a siren and a sailor. I still remember the last lines – With his last rites unsaid and him unmourned – she used to pause just there – He drowns, unbaptised, in the sea-foam font. For some reason, I always felt like I was the man in the poem."

Lukas pulled him closer. "We should go back to the land." he said gently, understanding. They kissed quickly, relieved that their love had made it through such trials, then turned back to shore, Mathias allowing himself to be ably led by Lukas, whom he now trusted with his life. And yet, Mathias couldn't quite rid himself of the feeling that his fate had not been avoided but merely postponed.


	10. Where Neither One Belongs

Copenhagen, 27th February 2013

Mathias checked his phone again. No new messages. No missed calls. He was becoming obsessed, he knew that, but he couldn't help looking every spare moment he got. Lukas hadn't promised to call him. He hadn't even seemed that bothered about it. But Mathias, for whatever reason, had become hooked on the idea that Lukas, despite his personal torment, might just have a moment to spare for him. More than that, he found that he was missing Lukas, with all his strangeness and mystery and general inscrutability. On reflection, he saw that he had come to enjoy their meetings and had thrilled in the idea that Lukas had come to trust him with his secret. And yet he still wasn't sure exactly what Lukas was to him. A friend? Perhaps, but friend wasn't exactly a word associated with Lukas, with his taciturnity and humourlessness. A creative partner? Well, on one level that was true, but really Lukas was far, far more than that – at least now that he had divulged so much.

There wasn't really a neat label that denoted their relationship, and Mathias felt his brain becoming enmeshed in its usual fruitlessly circuitous tangles as his thoughts began once more to descend down a path that they had followed with increasing frequency over the past two weeks. An issue was preoccupying him, preventing him from viewing Lukas objectively. Against his better judgement, and almost certainly very foolishly, he had begun to feel the first prickings of romantic attraction towards Lukas. He was in little doubt that this could only lead to trouble – after all, in his delicate mental state, Lukas could hardly deal with something like that – but there was nothing he could do to stop himself from remembering the finely-made features, the perceptive eyes so often full of anguish and the elegance with which he carried himself. Mathias sighed to himself. He was always doing this, always getting involved with the most complicated relationships possible. As a student, everything had seemed so clear-cut: play around now, start figuring out what you really want in your twenties then hopefully be with the right person by thirty or so. He was coming up for twenty-six and his pitiful excuse for a romantic life was ample evidence against the efficacy of such a plan. He had never thought that finding the perfect man would be so difficult – after all, everyone else seemed to be managing it.

His phone rang.

"Hello, is that Mathias?" Lukas's voice was breathless and urgent, and Mathias felt a bolt of familiarity run through him as he recognised it.

"Yes, it's me. How are you doing?" He was incalculably relieved to have heard from Lukas after all this time.

"I'm fine. Doing really well." The reply was insincere, a brightness to the voice that Lukas would never have used.

Mathias was suspicious. "Is someone watching you?" he asked.

There was silence for a moment, then, "Yes. And I've only got ten minutes, so we'll have to be quick."

Mathias understood the need for efficiency, although he was privately disappointed at this curtailment of their conversation. "Ok, that's fine. Listen, um… When will you be out?"

Lukas sighed, an electric storm of static through the phone. "Soon, hopefully. I have to sleep every night for a week without medication or anything, just so I can prove it's possible for me to fall asleep without being scared. Well, it's not actually possible, but I'm trying just so I can leave soon. I hate it here." A bitter laugh. "And my coffee intake is being very closely monitored."

Mathias couldn't help but smile at that. "How are the nightmares?" he asked, serious once more. Lukas hadn't described them in any great detail, and he was curious as to what they contained, but he knew well enough that they were what prevented him from sleeping.

"Horrific." A pause, as if he was remembering that he was being observed. "But they've been worse. I'll be alright."

"Are you sure I can't visit you?" Mathias asked, a little desperately. He didn't like the way Lukas was sounding, with his very deliberate cynicism and his old iciness back in force after his confessions of their last meeting. He had drawn the veil back over himself.

"You're not related to me, Mathias, and we're most definitely not married." Lukas replied firmly. "Besides, you don't want to see me like this."

"I wouldn't…"

Lukas cut him off. "And more to the point, I don't want you to see me like this."

He must have taken the phone away from his ear, since for a moment Mathias could hear the regimented madness going on in the background: beeps, voices, footsteps. He could hear Lukas saying something to someone but couldn't make out the words. "Lukas?" he asked uncertainly.

Lukas came back onto the line. "Mathias, I have to go now." he said urgently. "I probably won't call again. I'll see you when I leave."

Mathias wanted to tell him about the plan for the new book. "Oh, but there's just…"

The line went dead.

For a long time after the call had finished, Mathias sat looking down at the blank screen of his phone, taking deep breaths and trying not to do something irrational like hurling the device against the wall. There was a sort of calm fury rising up in him; a cold anger that could crack at any time, like the plug in the mouth of a volcano. It wasn't the type of anger that made him want to punch holes in the walls or other people like it had been the last time – instead, it was the type that made him want, very carefully and methodically, to smash every single stick of furniture in his flat. He wasn't sure who the feeling was directed at: himself, for becoming so emotionally invested in such a mess; Lukas, for not moving on after sixteen years; Emil, the eternal child, the spectre who had followed Lukas since that awful day. Really, there was no one to blame and there wasn't even a reason to blame anyone at all. The root of Mathias's frustration, after all, was the fact that there was nothing he could do to help Lukas, and there was nothing Lukas wanted help with. Lukas, it seemed, was wholeheartedly accepting of what came to him. With his writer's perceptiveness, Mathias saw that Lukas considered his nightmares as a punishment to be taken, not as an illness to be cured. He was struck by an unnervingly vivid image of Lukas, rigid beneath unfamiliar sheets, tears glistening on his cheeks and a whispered supplication dying on his lips as the night once more flooded in and he was, as always happened, given over to whatever unspeakable things flitted through the depths of his tortured mind.

Mathias blinked a few times, trying to get the vision out of his head. The small study, its closeness usually a comfort to him, was suddenly claustrophobic. He needed to get out – not to go drinking, since he had promised himself that he would never resort to that again, but to think. He could feel the restlessness that always came to him when his muse was returning, the feeling of faint excitement coupled with the inability to sit still and the smile that always rose to his face when his characters took over his thoughts. The feeling filtered through his helpless, emasculating frustration and made everything a little brighter. He pulled on his coat and shoes and went outside.

He walked along the gently-curving edge of the harbour, periodically casting glances at the mermaid statue that formed such a mainstay of the city where he had lived all his life. His mind was in a fever, ideas flooding in faster than he could organise them. It was a thrilling feeling, and one that, on reflection, he didn't experience nearly as often as he would like. He shook his head slightly. It was no use trying to remember everything. He would have to write it down. Finding a bench, he withdrew his notepad from his bag and, beneath the already-written title of Between Sea and Shore began hastily transcribing the contents of his thoughts.

Young boy, he wrote, no more than 7-9 years old. Unnamed so as to make it universal. Lonely, no family ever mentioned or implied, and feels out of place all the time. Goes swimming one day and finds himself in trouble. Blacks out on the point of drowning (not too graphic!) and wakes in a dark abyss, having gained a tail and the ability to breathe underwater. While there, thinking himself lost, two mermaids (anglerfish-like) come across him and wordlessly get him to follow them. They take him to the opening of the trench (he sees various types of fish along the way) and once there leave him to make his own way (they can't leave the abyss). He is lost once more and begins to wish for his life on land but sees a shoal of fish and decides to follow them. After a while, he encounters a group of mer-hunters after the same target who, despite initial suspicion, bring him back to meet their queen. On the way there, they explain to him that she has been in deep mourning for the last several years, ever since her baby son was washed away in a storm. Many young mermen have made it their mission to find him and win the grateful queen's hand in marriage but so far have had no success. Once he is brought before the queen, however, she immediately recognises him as her lost child and hugs him tightly, stating that she always knew he would one day be returned to her.

Mathias read over the notes, a little in awe of what he had managed to produce in such a small space of time. That had never happened to him before. He had never, not even as a child scribbling in the backs of his exercise books, had a whole story simply appear like that, fully-formed and ready to be written straightaway. Already, images in his mind were beginning to crystallise into words, into a work of simple beauty far different from his usual silly primary-school comedies. Somehow, he knew that with this book he would come of age as a writer, and it would be the making of him. He would go from the forgettable – amusing but undistinguished – to the life-changing. It had always been his dream to write a book that, in later life, people would say had defined their childhood. And he knew in his heart that if he were ever to write a book like that, it would be this one; the one that lay in its current incarnation of a few messy scribbles in a notebook with more pages ripped out than left in. The fairytale project could wait. The children of the world didn't need a new version of Cinderella. But they needed this.

Buoyed up by these jubilant thoughts, Mathias was still in fine humour when he arrived home. He sang a few notes of his favourite song – for once glad that he lived alone – and went through to the living room. Still singing, he threw his satchel in the general direction of the sofa… and missed. The bag hit his painting of Havmann Island and knocked it to the floor, shattering the glass of the frame. Swearing under his breath, he went over to the mess and knelt to pick up the pieces. The broken frame itself didn't bother him – the boyfriend who'd given it to him had left soon after, and it wasn't a relationship that he liked to remember in any great detail. But he was irritated with himself for his carelessness and kept up a steady stream of muttered admonishments as he removed the shards from the carpet. The back of the frame had also fallen off and as he lifted the picture from out of it, he noticed writing on the back. It was done in pencil and had faded almost to nothing, but if he squinted he could just make it out. Havmann Island, 3rd June 1830, he read. Surprised, he turned the picture up and looked at the blurred watercolour seascape. He'd never have expected it to be so old. It looked like the work of a student, or someone who painted for extra money during the tourist season. It really wasn't anything remarkable.

And yet, the more he looked at it, the more he got the sense that the place was calling to him somehow. In his mind, he could almost hear the crash of the waves as they hit the rocks and the lacklustre sigh as they retreated down the sand once more. He had no idea where Havmann Island was, beyond the fact that it was near Norway, and it had never before crossed his mind to visit or wonder if it was even possible to visit. But now he wanted to go, to escape from the pressures that came simply from being a social human being. More than that, he wanted to take Lukas with him.

…

Havmann Island, 20th July 1830

Mathias had never been happier. He and Lukas had spent the last few hours together, on the rocks or in the water, talking or laughing or simply being happy in each other's company in the way of any lovers in every time and place. Now, with the sun long gone and the crescent moon a seam of light in the sky, they lay together, hands clasped, looking up at the stars. The sand-grown grass pricked the backs of their necks, and Mathias shifted a little closer to Lukas, pulling him into an embrace and breathing in the warm salty scent of his hair. He reflected on the last time he had looked at the stars, the night when he had drunk so deeply of the deadly draught. They had been aloof then, coldly pristine like angels and unfeeling of his anguish. Now, however, they were benign – doing neither harm nor good, merely observing. They shone down on a very different man from before. Mathias broke the silence.

"On land," he said, "We sometimes make wishes when we see the stars."

Lukas scoffed lightly but nonetheless moved closer into Mathias's arms and laying his head against his chest. "What would you wish for?" he asked indulgently.

Mathias sighed, his great sorrow pressing on him as it did whenever he thought too deeply about his and Lukas's situation. "What I could never have. I would wish for a night with you – a whole one, not just a few hours. I would wish for every night with you, and every day. I would wish that we could be together forever, that I could wake up beside you every morning and that there were no more of these snatched hours where you can't stay and I can't go with you when you leave." He took a deep breath. "But if I said that, I would only be wasting my wish." His voice was like ashes.

Lukas was silent for a few moments, then he spoke, his voice as soft and measured as always. "Be glad we have the beach." he said.

Mathias frowned slightly, moving so he could look Lukas in the face. "What do you mean?"

"It is somewhere where we are equal. The land is not my home any more than the sea is yours. The beach is somewhere where neither of us belong, and in that we are united. I cannot stay there because my time on land is short and you cannot because the tide will always rise and turn the land to sea."

They were quiet once more. Mathias mused on the truth of Lukas's words, his eyes turned skywards as he searched for constellations, for a spot he recognised in the boundless night sky. He glanced down at Lukas, and saw that he was looking away from him. He sighed, feeling his secret uncomfortably within him. He wanted to tell Lukas about his shameful drug – no, he needed to – but didn't know how to broach the subject. Lukas had almost destroyed himself in telling him about Emil and now he feared that his own problem would seem trivial and that Lukas would think less of him for it.

"Lukas." he said, sitting up.

Lukas followed suit and the comfortable intimacy of moments before was lost. "What is it?" he asked softly.

"I have to tell you something, something I should have mentioned before." He wasn't sure how to go on. "You… You've seen the bottles above my bed, haven't you?"

Lukas nodded slowly. "I have." he replied.

The air was tense. Mathias swallowed, a faint feeling of nausea rising in his throat. He had never told anyone about his addiction before. Well, the whole of Copenhagen society knew, but they had found out by way of events, not his admission. He loved Lukas so much. To be somehow besmirched in his eyes would be the death of him. "Do you know what a drug is?" he asked at length. Lukas shook his head and Mathias went on. "There are many different types and what is in the bottles is something called laudanum. It dulls the senses and stops me from feeling things as strongly as I would without it. I started to take drops of it when I lived on the land and hated the people around me and the feelings I couldn't help having, and my shame is that I have continued to take it since coming here."

Lukas frowned. "Why, though, did you feel such need to stop yourself from feeling things?"

This was the moment Mathias had been dreading, the moment when he would have to justify himself and listen to his own pathetic excuses ringing in his ears. He stood up, fixing his eyes on a suitably distant point. He tried to keep his voice calm but his words came out angry and frustrated. "Because," he said. "I hate the life I lead when I am on land. I hate it so much that I try to pretend that it isn't mine. I try to make it go by faster, so that I feel things as a constant ache instead of a thousand different wounds. I hate the way my life has gone thus far and I hate the drug that holds me prisoner even as I love it for numbing me and making me quiescent when I would otherwise be raging!"

Lukas also stood up, apparently unwilling to sit and be lectured. "I don't understand!" he protested. "I have never had the need or desire to recourse to such a thing and yet my pain has been infinitely greater than yours. What need have you, now that you are away from the things that so disgust you, to continue in this way?"

Their arguing voices rang out into the near-silence, easily rising above the rustle of the waves. Mathias drew a weary hand across his face. "Because, although my old sorrows have gone, I have new ones to replace them."

"Like what?" Lukas's voice was hostile, the unacknowledged thought of Emil and the depths of sorrow to which he had driven him present in both their minds.

"Like you! I love you more than I thought I could love anyone, more truly and constantly and naturally than ever before. It's like what I said: if I had one wish, it would be for us to always be together. But every day we are separated again and again, and every time it hurts just as much as the time before. Without you, I am a ghost of myself. So, in answer to your question, I 'continue in this way' because otherwise the pain of losing you every day would send me to madness or my death." His voice was desperate and ragged, his tone pleading with Lukas to understand his weak man's misery.

Mathias felt tears boiling in his eyes and let them overflow, sobbing with an ugly mix of self-hate, love that brought both pain and joy and despair at the prospect of what he planned to do – live a life free from laudanum. He no longer cared if Lukas hated him. How could he hate himself, after all, and still expect love from someone else? "Please understand," he beseeched Lukas without looking at him. "I have always done these things for love, and because of the pain it brings me." To his surprise, he felt Lukas's thin arms around him.

"I understand." came the soft reply, the voice tear-choked like Mathias's own.

There was no further need for words, and the two of them stood together under the celestial blaze of stars, each trying to stem the flow of tears and console himself with what little comfort there was to be had from the other and, in his own heart, suffering from the excruciating truth of Mathias's words: that no matter what they did, they could never be truly together.


	11. Departure

Copenhagen Harbour, 15th March 2013

As Mathias stood on the deck of the ferry, watching the city slowly recede until it was only a glimmer veiled in the mist of early morning, he felt suffused with a wonderful sense of relief. Now, away from all the pressures of society, all the preordained patterns of existence and the dreadful, ever-present feeling that life was somehow passing him by, he was content. The mask was slipping from his face and revealing him to himself, the man he had forgotten existed under all the layers of artifice and dissatisfaction. Alone as he was, separate somehow from the crowds that surged around him looking for a view of the place they were leaving behind – for what reason no one besides them could ever know – he took time to reflect on recent events.

For him, what was most significant was that Lukas was with him. Not physically at that moment – he had gone to get what Mathias supposed would be the first of many cups of coffee – but accompanying him on this self-consciously artistic endeavour. It hadn't been easy to persuade him to come. He let out a fluting sigh and turned his gaze from the shore to the sea, lost in thoughts as fathomless and ultimately unsolvable as the ocean itself. Lukas, upon his being declared fit to return to decent society, had flown like a long-captive bird straight to the one person he remembered as having shown him kindness – Mathias himself. He had seen Lukas at his most vulnerable, when he hadn't yet shaken off the shades of nightmares that still clung to him. On seeing him in such a reduced state, Mathias had had to ignore the blossoming feelings of attraction and act principally as a friend and confidant, even as he itched to know if his love was returned. But Lukas had seemed so crushed, so bowed and defeated, that Mathias's first instinct had been to protect him.

"I can't spend another minute here," Lukas had said in despair, "I can't stand this city. I thought that if I moved here, it would be fine since no one would know me. But even the people who don't know you still find ways to judge." Mathias had seen his misery and in that moment had so desperately wanted to throw his arms around him and promise something – he didn't know what – that would reassure him. Instead, he had let his hands lie limply folded in his lap, afraid of breaking through Lukas's layer of reserve.

"I know somewhere we can go." he had replied, feeling his conviction grow with every word. "Do you remember my picture of Havmann Island?"

Lukas had clutched his coffee cup, frowning over its rim. "Why do you want to go there?" he had asked, but with curiosity rather than hostility. A good sign, Mathias had thought, and pressed on.

"I don't know," he had admitted. "But I've been thinking about it a lot recently and the more I do, the more I feel like it's somehow special to me. And I think we both need this, this isolation. I can write there, and you can draw, and really I just want to be away from people for a while."

Lukas had demurred, shaking his head and taking refuge in another long draught of coffee. "I'm not sure," he had said weakly. "I'll have to consider it."

Mathias had insisted. "I don't see why not. You want to go away, don't you? It's as good a place as any, surely."

Lukas had put down the cup and remained silent for a few moments, thoughts flickering like clouds across the impassive moon of his face. Mathias had observed him secretly, marvelling at his beauty, a pale statue lit by the white light of the grey day.

"Alright," Lukas had said at last. "Alright, I'll come with you."

Mathias was brought out of his trance by Lukas coming up beside him, carrying two cups of coffee.

"I got yours with the caramel syrup in," he said, proffering one of the drinks. "You seem the type."

Mathias took it and thanked him. They were out of sight of land now, and he felt a faint stirring of nerves. He had never liked travelling by boat and never liked being in water either. He'd had a mortal fear of drowning all his life, and as a child had had dreams of his mouth and lungs filling with seawater, waking up coughing and bringing up nothing. But he couldn't say that to Lukas, who had suffered so much more at the hands of the sea than he ever had. He thought back to his first swimming lesson. Holding on to the side of the pool, he'd been fine, but as soon as they'd had to let go and take their first few experimental strokes, as soon as he was untethered and began to sink, he had become hysterical, screaming in terror and causing his mother to come running in, thinking her son was being drowned. In the end, he'd never learnt to swim, and always been a laughing stock at teenage beach parties, where he hadn't dared wade in above his knees.

"Are you excited?" he asked Lukas brightly, wanting to think of something other than the unmeasured depths below them and wishing he'd never been persuaded to watch Titanic.

Lukas shrugged as much as was possible in his fitted jacket. Mathias envied his sense of style, the slimness that let him carry off outfits that Mathias himself could only dream about. "Not really," he replied neutrally, "Although I'm glad to be getting away." There was a moment's pause. "I went down to the car to move some stuff around," Lukas continued after a moment. "Any particular reason why you brought beach toys?"

Mathias grinned, a little embarrassed. "Just for fun, I guess. We have our own beach – it would be…" he stopped himself just before saying 'madness' "… pointless not to build some sandcastles!"

Lukas shook his head. "How old are you?" he asked in a voice which Mathias could have sworn contained a note of amusement.

"Lukas!" he protested playfully. "It's rude to ask a lady her age!"

Lukas's mouth quirked up at one corner for a fraction of a second, then became a thin line once more. Mathias smiled to himself. Away from everything, he was beginning to recover his natural optimism and humour. Perhaps, upon his return, he would be able to retain it, he thought. Everything seemed brighter, the clouds parting to allow a gleam of early spring sunshine onto the deck.

By the time they began to see the trickle of buildings that precipitated the flood of occupation as they came into Stavanger in order to catch their second boat, it was early evening, and Mathias sensed that something had changed between him and Lukas. Perhaps it was the profound relief of having no responsibilities, or perhaps it was simply that they were beginning to feel more at ease with each other, but despite their being mostly in silence, when their conversation came, it flowed easily. Lukas had been making sketches for the new book, an idea which he had welcomed, although he hadn't really understood the purpose behind it.

"It's a nice idea, Mathias," he had said, "And I'd love to do the illustrations, but I don't really understand what the message is. What are you trying to say here?"

Mathias had stared out of the window for a while, watching the mountains that glowered down at the road as if they resented the presence of humans in this empty, unpopulated, elemental place. Eventually, he had formed a response.

"I suppose," he had said at length. "It's for anyone who's ever felt out of place – you know, trapped between two worlds. Children have such a struggle fitting in, and I want the book to show them that, though it may be painful or difficult, they'll find where they belong eventually."

Lukas had given him an appraising look and asked, "Have you found your place in the world yet?"

"No," he had replied. "No, I don't think I have."

Lukas had inclined his head in acknowledgement of the answer and gone back to his drawing of the imagined boy, a life being created on paper.

A little later, once they had been silent for a while, Lukas had spoken again.

"You know," he had said. "This book is my first commission."

Mathias, startled both by the information and the fact Lukas had willingly initiated conversation, had been unable to hide his shock.

"Really? But you have your degree and your website and everything else!"

"No one likes what they see," Lukas had explained wearily, "Or if they do, they meet me and don't want to work with me afterwards. I don't mind particularly. I draw whether I have to or not. I read. I stay awake."

Mathias hadn't been able to resist asking where he got his money from.

"My parents are rich, remember?" Lukas had replied. "They send me money every month to keep me in paint. Just as long as I don't come home, of course. They don't want anything more to do with me. They've washed their hands of me, because I can't wash the blood off my own." His voice was expressionless – clearly, he had come to realise this fact a long time ago.

"Oh. I'm sorry."

A sigh. "Why do people always feel the need to apologise?" The question required no answer, and got none.

A little way outside the town was a church that Mathias had been meaning to visit for a long time. It contained a memorial to his predecessor, put up by his best friend in the wake of his death, and as they approached Mathias felt a faint tingling of trepidation in the back of his mouth. The stones of the church were a forbidding grey even in the sepia light of the spring evening, the building a hulking form vaguely redolent of the country's Viking past. It looked as though it could withstand the day of judgement itself, standing like a fortress in the middle of the scattered mass of gravestones with a hundred individual tragedies inscribed on them. It was a singularly unwelcoming place, and the colourful posters on the noticeboard that did nothing to dispel the air of disapproval the place seemed to exude. He pulled into the car park and turned the engine off, an act which caused Lukas to look up with a frown of confusion.

"Is everything alright?" he asked.

Mathias nodded. "Yes, but I'd just like to stop here for a minute. We're in plenty of time and there's a plaque here to a writer I really admire. You don't have to come in. I won't take long."

Lukas shook his head. "No, it's fine. I'd like to have a look as well."

Mathias smiled to himself. Every time Lukas took an interest in something outside his obsessively introspective guilt or his art, he felt like they had both achieved something.

Once inside, Mathias was struck by the opulence of the church's interior compared to its outside austerity. He hadn't been raised a churchgoer and had never got into the habit himself, to which end he knew very little about churches. Still, he found something almost comforting in the idea of being part of a community, although equally he didn't want to be defined by his beliefs. He existed in a fairly comfortable state of deciding not to worry about the afterlife until he was dead. He wondered what Lukas believed in, and whether it brought him comfort or even greater pain. Did he fear oblivion for Emil, Mathias mused, or damnation for himself?

Lukas immediately detached himself to go and look at the stained glass in the windows and Mathias began to search for the plaque. It was no easy task in the candlelight, the windows dark with evening. Their euphoric blaze of colours was something to be viewed in the daylight. When he eventually found it, he was surprised at how small and insignificant it was, nestled among memorials to other forgotten people, made out of dull copper and with the inscription in sober black. His predecessor hadn't died on the island, nor in Stavanger itself, but the circumstances of his death had made a small commemoration far away from Copenhagen desirable. He read the writing out loud, feeling a shiver run down his back at reading his own name off a grave.

Sacred to the Memory of Mathias Køhler, Born 2nd April 1805, Died 20th November 1831

'One whose name was writ in water.'

Put up by Gilbert Beilschmidt in February 1832 to commemorate a true friend

"He's got your name."

Mathias almost jumped, dredged out of his trance by Lukas's unexpected arrival and comment.

"Yes," he replied. "Though we're not related. Just one of those little coincidences, you know."

Lukas moved a little closer, raising a hand to the metal. "Where did he live? I might know it."

Mathias shook his head. "Not around here. He was from Copenhagen, and died there, but he spent a year on one of the islands in the chain we're going to, and it's there that he was happiest. But really, the plaque's here instead of there because when he died, things were sort of covered up," He sighed. "You see that quote?"

Lukas nodded. "I've heard of it somewhere." he said.

"It's from the grave of John Keats," Mathias explained. "Keats meant it to show that his fame was short-lived – although of course it wasn't for him – but here it has another meaning. The thing is, no one's quite sure what happened to Mathias – sorry, it's a bit weird saying my own name like that – since, like I said, it was sort of covered up. The general idea is that he drowned, and the plaque backs that up." At the mention of drowning, Mathias felt a sort of memory echo in the oldest, most animal part of his brain, a vague feeling of cold water closing over him and of being pulled down, so far down. He recovered himself in time for Lukas's next question, surprised that Lukas seemed unbothered by the thought of drowning. Perhaps it was because he blamed himself instead of the sea, Mathias thought.

"So what was so bad about that?" Lukas asked.

Mathias cleared his throat. "Well, the official line was that it was accidental, but there was also speculation that he had… done away with himself, and of course in the nineteenth century that was absolutely shocking. So he wasn't talked about in polite society anymore, his friend had to put up the memorial a long way off, and he's still forgotten today."

"Do you think he deserves to be remembered?" The way Lukas asked the question was almost like a test, as if he was measuring Mathias's devotion to his idol.

"Yes," Mathias replied with certainty. "But only for his last book, the one he never finished. His earlier stuff is just terrible. He wrote half of it when he was stoned on laudanum and it really shows, but this last book is different. It's absolutely impassioned and completely sincere when almost everything else he wrote was so untruthful, so obviously written for the money. I think you should read it, because I've never read anything more heartfelt."

"What's it about?" Lukas asked.

"Everything he hated," Mathias said. "There's the hypocrisy of high society, the soullessness, the way everyone pretended to care about other people but really didn't. The main character's called Lukas, actually, and he's this young man who makes his debut and absolutely falls in love with the glamour of it all, but then he begins to hallucinate strange things. He confides in a doctor, who ends up spreading the rumour that he's gone mad, and – since the book was never finished – it ends with Lukas about to be locked up. I wanted to write about it for my university thesis, but my lecturers said it wasn't considered a classic. I would have written about Lukas, such a fascinating character. I think he was half Mathias's creation and half himself – the virtues were another's but the vices were his own." He stopped abruptly, a little embarrassed at having gone on for so long and appearing to be a bore. "So yeah," he finished lamely. "You should have a look at it. I've brought it with me, if you want to borrow."

Lukas nodded slowly, seeming to pick up on Mathias's love for the book. "I think I will." he replied.

…

Between Havmann Island and Stavanger, 27th May 1831

The sands of time had run out. Sand, like on a beach. Sea and sand, sea and shore, unexpected union and inevitable separation. It was quite beautiful, really, at this time of day, at this time of year. There was always a strange stillness about the place, though. Not even a bird disturbed the silence, never did. Silence. He'd got used to that. He'd had so much of it over the past year.

Mathias blinked slowly a few times, trying to clear his mind and distinguish his thoughts from one another as they swirled in an opiated haze. His year was up and he was returning to the place where he least wanted to be: home. He had always known that his time on the island would be limited, but in the absence of any sort of obligations the days had merged into one without anything to mark them out from each other. Christmas, New Year, his birthday… All had passed by unnoticed. But the one date that had always hovered like a rain-filled stormcloud in his thoughts had now arrived, and he was leaving everything he cared about.

Lukas. Lukas, Lukas, Lukas. The name was a promise, a prayer, a two-syllable poem with the first syllable stressed. LU-kas. LU-kas. It was his compass, his truth, his validation. And it belonged to someone he would never see again. He wondered where Lukas was as the rickety boat forged its uncertain way through the waves. They had said their goodbyes the previous day, and it was then that Mathias had been reminded of the gulf that existed between them. He had seen Lukas with his tail on again. He had pressed his hand to it and marvelled at its pulsing, living strength, at the regular pounding of blood along its length. He had seen how it fused so perfectly with Lukas's human torso, without any appearance of jarring or unnatural transplant, and how it was so fully him, how it was not part of him but his own self. It was at that moment that he had come to see the truth of things: the tail was Lukas's true nature, the reality of him and the reason why no union between them could ever be permanent. Every beat of blood Mathias felt through the gleaming blue scales marked off another moment of their time together, and he felt the narrowing of it keenly. He wondered that they had ever come together at all when Lukas lived a life so unknown to him, and was so completely a thing of the sea.

He had told Lukas that he would have to leave soon, and been gratified yet guilty that Lukas had taken it stoically. He could never tell if Lukas hid his emotions or truly didn't feel them, and it was something that was frustrating to him.

"I'll try to come back." he had promised, taking Lukas's hand and being amazed anew at the glorious array of shades in his shining scales. Even as he had said the words, he had known that the subtle entrapments of society would make another escape impossible.

Lukas had shaken his head. "Do not make such a promise," he had replied. "You will make a liar of yourself."

"I am a liar, and have always been a liar. I trade in lies." Mathias had said with a hint of bitterness at his own weakness.

"You have never told me anything but the truth." Lukas had answered, his simple reassurance and expression of trust more than Mathias's poor bruised heart could bear.

Mathias felt nausea rising and took a few breaths to calm his tormented body that once more was suffering from too much of the vile drug. He stared down into the depths, imagining hundreds of silvery tails flicking the darkness. Lukas, perhaps, would be among them. Their last few hours together, which they had spent the previous night, would forever live in his memory as the time when they had been able to forget their parting just for those few short hours allotted to them, and during those precious hours they had existed wholly in the bliss of the moment and thought of nothing but each other and their love.

"I will be back. I will be yours again." he had whispered fiercely in an instant snatched between kisses that became ever more desperate as the night wore on and between murmured declarations of love, repeated countless times as they tried to reassure each other of their sincerity.

"Don't say that," Lukas had protested. "Love me truly, not with these impossible vows. Let me remember you as an honest man."

The moon and stars had blazed with an almost violent brightness, burning through the window of the small house and filling the room with silver, silver that had caught the cross Lukas always wore in his hair and made it glow gold.

"I love you." they had told each other countless times. "I love you, and I am glad to have lost my heart to you, and I will always remember you."

Mathias felt tears pricking his eyes and stared into the depths. He willed himself to become one with the water, to be cold and slow-moving and emotionless. To have energy but be lifeless, to be a force but not a thinking creature – that was how he would survive the rest of his time on earth. He would pay homage to Lukas's strength by emulating it. But the agony was unbearable. He and Lukas had found their twin halves in each other. They had fused and now, with indescribable pain, they were being split apart.

And there was one more thing. Once Lukas had gone back to the sea, once he truly couldn't stay another moment and they had pressed their lips together for the last time and been parted for the last time, Mathias had done two things. Firstly, he had opened his neatly-packed luggage and withdrawn from it a single bottle. The lid had been stiff and difficult to remove, but it had come away eventually. He hadn't been tempted by the false pleasure of the drug in a long time, not since that starlit night so many months before, but now this was truly the only thing that could ease his pain, the first real pain he had felt in his life, the pain that made all other pains nothing. The laudanum had tasted more bitter than he remembered, and it had clung to his mouth and throat and made him feel like he was choking on a damp cloth. The second thing he had done was to take out a pen, paper and second bottle – this time of ink – and write a letter to Lukas; a letter that would never be sent, addressed to a lover who could not read. He had slipped it between two of the bricks in the wall, somewhere he hoped no one would ever look, and then sipped a last drop of laudanum and fallen asleep without dreams.


	12. The Truth In His Words

Copenhagen, 30th June 1831

The night was absolute. Clouds eclipsed the moon and only a few weak stars gave out a tired light. A set of candles suffused the room with a soft, parchment-yellow glow by which Mathias studied himself in the spotted, antique mirror. The glass was old and dark, throwing his strong features into relief and dusting shadows along the edges, as though he was viewing himself from under several feet of murky water. He barely knew the man he was, and could not meet his own eyes, not with that dead, dull look of defeat they held. It was the sort of look associated with soldiers who had seen too much, not with a man who flitted in and out of social gatherings, smiled at all the right moments and who had made a name for himself narrating the silly but ultimately endearing foibles of the upper class. He saw all this, and more, in the singular lack of life in his own eyes. His pulse was slow; when he raised a finger to his neck to measure it, it seemed to drag somehow. His thoughts too were slow; they moved sluggishly, like a frozen river beginning to thaw. That was only to be expected after his indulgence in the laudanum – indeed, it was welcomed. He had no desire to function at full capacity, to have his mind on anything other than what was happening in the present. He would not think of Lukas, or what he had left behind.

It was unusual for him to be alone as he was. In the month since his return, he had hardly been without company for a single evening. Solitude had increased his dislike of this vapid flitting from entertainment to entertainment to even higher levels than before his time away. Then, he had been able to fool himself into thinking that his lifestyle was the best that could be expected. There had been no idea of alternatives; he was at the top of society, therefore the only way was down. It had not then occurred to him that there might be something not intrinsically better or worse but simply different from what he was used to. Society was not open to the idea of difference. But now that he had been away and experienced what could be in a place without laws and judgements, he could no longer pretened there was nothing else because he knew that there was, and he knew that he could no longer convince himself that what he had was the best, because he knew that it was not.

Mechanically, without feeling, he reached into his pocket and extracted his laudanum bottle. He had been doing this more and more recently; taking drops every few hours instead of once or twice a day. He had begun to suffer from the effects of doing so: dry mouth, sickness, shortness of breath… The list went on. But he preferred to endure these than to endure the greater pain of life without this vital numbing. He measured out and swallowed two drops, the amount he usually needed to get through a sleepless night. His whole body protested; he was destroying himself and he knew it. The most important thing, however, in this world ruled by appearances, was that no one else knew it.

His house felt like it was no longer his own; it was strange to look out of the windows and see other buildings, other people. It was strange to wake to other people's conversations in the street, the hawkers' cries, the percussive, echoing sound of horses' hooves and the low grinding of carriage wheels. But now, in the abyss of night, there was no sound, only a bleakly uniform quiet. He wore the silence like a shroud; it settled on him and chilled him. The fire was down to lukewarm embers and outside his circle of candlelight the room was in cold darkness. The stars were faint and remote; they held none of the passionate fire they had when he had last been with Lukas. Mathias consulted his pocket watch and saw that it was three in the morning. His dull, drugged mind slowly registered that he could not afford to be burning candles all through the night, not at the rate his supposed masterpiece was coming on. The laudanum was beginning to take effect, and he gratefully began his accustomed decline into unnatural sleep.

The following evening, Mathias stood in front of the mirror again, this time in better light, as he readied himself for yet another unwanted party. Spiritually exhausted, he went through the familiar motions of preparation: starched, stiff-collared shirt, trousers, waistcoat, shoes brutally polished to a high shine. His hands shook as he tied the black silk cravat and he had to bite down on his bottom lip to focus his attention on the moment. His mind was a fragile thing; he feared it was beginning to crack. Today, as often happened, the world seemed too loud and full and colourful for him to understand. He had not yet taken his drops and was still firmly anchored to reality, the riotous sounds from outside reaching him with an intensity he had become unused to. The noise crowded in through the window, a maddening cacophony that seemed to have an almost musical beat, repetitively pounding his throbbing skull. It was all he could do not to put his hands over his ears. The laudanum was wearing him down, destroying his functions. It was killing him, and he knew that by taking it he was killing himself.

Every signal his body sent him was ordering him, begging him, to stop doing what he was doing. Every day the signals became ever more desperate and his addiction deepened even further until it was ingrained in him, one of his most fundamental requirements. But to be without it would be unimaginably worse, for to be without it was to sit at his desk until all hours trying to force out words to finish his great work. It was to lie awake with memories and unfulfilled desires swirling through his mind. It was to think of Lukas, to wish for him, to remember him and mourn their separation. It was intolerable. But he would continue. He would bring his novel to its resolution; that was something to live for. After that, he was not certain of what he would do. He thought of Lukas and remembered a moment when they had lain together, when he had experienced a sense of contentment that he could no longer even imagine. He had traced the line of Lukas's soft mouth, trying to commit its perfect shape to memory so that he could write about it later.

"What are you doing?" Lukas had asked good-naturedly.

"Learning to draw you." he had replied with a smile.

"You can't draw," Lukas had teased. "It would take you all your life to learn."

"I can draw you with words," he had said. "It's better that way. If I drew your picture, everyone would see your face and so your face would belong to everyone. If I describe you, every person will see something different but it will mean so much more to them because what they see will be their own. I'm not showing people what you look like, I'm helping them to imagine. They will imagine you in their own way and I will still have you – the real you – to myself."

The memory caused an indescribable pain to well up in him. With trembling desperation, he seized his bottle and swallowed two drops, then a third, then a fourth. Lukas's radiant image disappeared from his mind, slowly sinking, drowned by the artificial calmness of the drug as he faded to murkiness and Mathias felt a sort of temporary, unstable peace being restored to him. With luck, it would last him all night.

The party was being held in the house of someone he did not know well, but who Gilbert did. As he stood in the drawing room watching groups form and disperse like iron filings being drawn by a magnet, he reflected that since his return he had come more and more to rely on Gilbert's social cachet. It was as though he himself had been forgotten in his absence. His existing books had sold only a few copies in the year he had been away and, since his promised masterwork had so far failed to appear, people were losing interest in him. Eccentricity could only be justified if it was matched by genius. Mathias's was not, and as such he was considered merely antisocial. So far he had not been engaged in conversation beyond passing pleasantries. It suited him to be alone this particular evening, and although it was a blow to no longer be the talk of the town, he knew that he needed to observe, to sharpen his wit back to its former levels. Catching sight of a familiar shock of white hair, he saw that Gilbert was looking at him in the strange way he had all evening. Their eyes met and his friend subtly beckoned him to come into the corner.

"What's wrong with you tonight?" Gilbert demanded once they were in the relative privacy of their own conversation. He was the shorter of the two by an inch or so, but he was a successful playwright, far more popular than Mathias, and this success was evident in the way he carried himself. Mathias, on the other hand, often wished that he was not so tall. It made him feel useless and ungainly when shorter people admonished him, as Lukas had sometimes had cause to do.

He shrugged. "I don't know what you mean." he replied lamely.

Gilbert threw his arms up in exasperation. "You've been on the laudanum again, haven't you?" he asked in a stage whisper. Seeing Mathias's defensive expression he went on. "And don't lie to me. I can see it. Your eyes are like pinpricks."

The personal attack hit its mark, and Mathias drew himself up a few inches. Both he and Gilbert could have quite a temper on them when provoked, and he was prepared to argue if necessary. "What I do is my own damn affair, and I'll thank you to keep out of it." he said in a calm voice laced with warning.

A faint spray of red appeared on Gilbert's white cheeks. " Look at yourself! You can't be trusted to manage your own affairs!" he replied angrily. A few people turned with raised eyebrows and he lowered his voice again. "I'm saying this to you because you're my friend, Mathias, and because I'm worried about you. People were expecting you to have written a book – two books – by the time you reappeared, but instead you've produced nothing. I know you're working on something, or so you tell me, but it's taking you a damn long time and people are becoming impatient. You can't live on your old reputation forever."

Mathias saw his sincerity, and the speech had given voice to some of his own concerns. "What do you propose?" he asked.

Gilbert sighed. "Two things, really. Firstly, write something, and write something good. That new Kirkland fellow's been causing quite a stir with A Fashionable Pair or whatever it's called. He's doing what you did and he's doing it a hundred times better. You have competition – fierce competition – so whatever you write must mark you out."

"And the second thing?" Mathias prompted with a sense of foreboding.

"A society wedding," Gilbert said. "There are plenty of young women, and for the most part their parents will beg you to take them. I married three years ago. Most of the men our age – and younger as well – already have. You have no good reason to be single, and the longer you remain so the less attractive you will become."

It was all Mathias could do not to physically step back in shock. Marriage… No, it was impossible. He could never love a woman. He could never pretend to love a woman. He could never bring himself to marry any of the girls he danced with or raised his hat to or sat next to at dinner. He loved someone else, and he had promised that he would never love again. He loved Lukas, and he could not even imagine himself with anyone other than him. Dimly, through the maelstrom of his swirling thoughts, he realised that Gilbert was awaiting a response.

"I… I don't think I could," he stammered out. "The writing's taking all my time at the moment. I wouldn't be the most attentive husband. And none of the women here are really to my liking."

Gilbert scoffed and made a sweeping gesture, encompassing the whole room. "How noble of you! But tell me truly, my friend, how many of the men here love their wives? How many are faithful to them? Marriage is a contract – you said that yourself in one of your books. So why you feel such an aversion to someone you do not love – and what would you even consider to be love? – is beyond me," His face hardened. "I have never understood your position on this matter, Køhler," he said icily, switching to the surname as though they were recent acquaintances rather than lifelong friends. "Half your writing condemns marriage and the other extols its virtues. Are you really so inconstant in your thoughts? Or are you so insincere that you have no beliefs of your own?"

Mathias felt his heart speed up. Gilbert's words were coming dangerously close to hinting at what he had always kept secret. He looked frantically around the room, trying to distract himself by looking at one of the paintings, or the particular scrollwork on a chair, or a group of people glimpsed through the open door, but he could not calm himself. When he spoke, his voice was tight and wooden. "I am grateful for your concern for me but…"

Gilbert impatiently cut him off. "Think on it," he said. "Marriage is a cover. If you love a poor woman, marry a rich one and see the other on the side. If you are waiting for love, marry now and see the better one when she comes along. Marriage is useful for hiding all manner of vices," He fixed Mathias with a perceptive glare. "And, if such a thing is of concern to you, it can be used to conceal the greatest vice of all."

With that, he turned and walked away, shedding his seriousness easily and putting on a smile as he went to talk to a group of acquaintances. Mathias remained in the corner, shocked into stillness, and wondering whether, if Gilbert had guessed where his preferences lay, they would soon be common knowledge. He took a glass of wine from a tray carried by a passing servant and drank it all in one swallow. The room seemed to be a scene from a play; it was false, it was unnerving, and it held nothing for him.

…

Havmann Island, 20th March 2013

Mathias was desperate to move. He had several little itches that needed to be scratched, part of his elaborate hairstyle was beginning to collapse, and he was craving something to eat. With an attempt at discretion, he subtly began to raise his arm.

"Stop!" Lukas commanded, without looking up from his sketchpad.

Mathias managed not to sigh. It was nice being drawn, but he hadn't expected it to take so long or involve so much sitting still. It just wasn't natural.

"Can't you just take a picture and copy it out?" he whined.

Lukas put down his pencil and gave him a withering look. "It's called life drawing for a reason." he said, exasperated.

"No one will know!" Mathias protested.

Lukas sighed. "If you don't draw from a live model, you don't get a real sense of the person," he explained, picking up the pencil again. "Besides, you have a good face for drawing. You have very bold features."

Mathias smiled widely. "Are you saying I'm good-looking?" he asked teasingly.

"I'm saying you have very bold features." Lukas replied, turning his gaze back to the paper. The faintest hint of blush was beginning to show on his face.

Later, Mathias had time to reflect on their conversation. Mostly about the blush, of course. He wasn't exactly arrogant, but he had a sense of being an attractive person, hence why he took such care of his appearance. He was pleased with himself for not having pursued the question. A few weeks ago, he would have done so and made Lukas close up or retract the compliment or get angry with him. Perhaps, he reflected, he was becoming more mature. He had studied literature at university and so had become attuned to the significance of every little gesture an author put into their writing. Sometimes he applied this perceptiveness to real life, and now he was wondering what the blush could have meant. Had they been flirting? Had Lukas simply paid a compliment and become embarrassed when it was misconstrued? Had he been dropping hints for a while and not been noticed? After all, it had been Lukas who asked Mathias if he would sit for a drawing, not Mathias who had requested to be drawn.

He sighed and shifted position in the windowseat so that he was staring out to sea. It was not so much a seat as a low sill, and not even the modern addition of fashionable neutral-coloured cushions could change the fact that it was not designed for comfort. But Mathias liked it. It seemed to be his own somehow, and when he sat there his thoughts seemed to flow a little more freely and coherently. He felt guilty for thinking so much about the blush, since something else in their conversation had caught his attention even more. Lukas had said how it was necessary to draw from life in order to retain a sense of the person, but there was the portrait of Emil that Mathias had never forgotten about and that had clearly been done from memory. He wondered about it now, looking out over the violent waves. A storm was rising, and he felt the old pinch of nerves in the pit of his stomach. A feeling of cold, like a plunge into water, abruptly rushed over him with the sharpness of a memory and he shivered. His thoughts returned to Emil, and he wondered if Lukas had spent so long doing his eternal penance for the accidental death that he had ceased to see Emil as a person and begun to consider him a symbol of all his problems. Emil was the root cause of all this worry and sadness and regret, the very first loop in this Gordian knot. If Emil had lived that stormy day, Mathias thought, Lukas would have been happy. He would have lived – truly lived – a happy life, and the boat story would have become a thing for parties, a 'my God, we could have died' story told to rapt audiences. Instead, he was chained to the past by what to him was a crime and to Mathias an accident.

As Mathias had predicted, a storm hit with incredible force at around midnight. He sat on his bed and stared out of the window, watching in fear at its primeval force. The hailstones pierced the surface of the sea like bullets and threw up fountains of spray as they landed. The lightning flared across the sky like a whip and was answered moments later by the crack of thunder. The waves reared higher and higher, each one piling on top of others until they were a roiling, indistinct mass of flinty grey topped with stale yellow foam. He felt stupid and childish, being afraid of storms, but he couldn't help it. Water terrified him. It was violent, it was unknown and untamed, and at this moment, where the water tumbling from the sky met the water in the sea, it was the perfect union of the two, and it scared him even more.

There was a knock on his door and he frowned in confusion. What could Lukas be wanting at this hour? Unless he too was scared of storms and needed comfort. Mathias shook his head. That would never happen.

"You can come in!" he called out, shouting to be heard over the thunder.

The door swung open and Lukas stood there, clutching the first Mathias's unfinished novel and looking as if he'd been crying. He threw the book onto the bed. "You can have it back." he said thickly.

Mathias was startled but gestured for Lukas to come and sit beside him. Lukas hesitated in the doorway for a moment but eventually obeyed.

"What's wrong with it?" Mathias asked. "I thought you'd like the main character. He reminded me of you a bit."

"So you think I'm weak, easily influenced and completely pathetic?" Lukas demanded.

Mathias sighed. "How much of it did you read?" he asked, picking up the book from where Lukas had thrown it.

"Enough," Lukas replied stubbornly. "I got to the bit where he's talking to the woman at the party and he's seeing fairies floating around her head but doesn't know what to do about it," He held up his hand to stop Mathias from leaping to the book's defence. "And I know it probably represents something fancy but I don't care. I hate it."

"But why?"

"Because it's so ridiculous!" Lukas replied angrily. "You said the writer was a drug addict – well, he was clearly on something stronger than laudanum when he wrote that book! He could have written something realistic and instead he retreated into fantasy to put whatever message it was across. And why? Because he was scared, that's why! Whatever he wanted to say, he couldn't say it openly. The difference is that some writers would say it anyway, but instead he hid his message away, buried it so deeply that no one could tell what it was."

He stoppedm and for a long moment both of them were silent. After a moment, Mathias realised that Lukas was crying again.

"I'm not sure if…" Mathias began, ready to launch into his literature-scholar explanation of the themes of disillusionment and dissatisfaction.

Lukas cut him off. "I know what he was doing, Mathias!" he cried out, more impassioned than Mathias had ever seen him before. "And I know what he was doing because it's what I do. I have never been brave enough to stand up and say 'when I was nine years old, I killed a boy'. I've never been able to say that. Instead, I just fill all my sketchbooks with these fantasy scenes. I have whole books with shipwrecks and sirens and sea monsters and it's because, over all these years, I've had nightmares where all these monsters attack Emil. And I know now that it's because I'm scared to admit the fact that nothing and no one but me was to blame for his death but me. There are no monsters. There is only me, and the stupid, arrogant little boy I used to be."

He paused before launching into his speech again, making no move to wipe away his tears. "And I'll tell you what your beloved writer was doing. He was fighting against society, yes, but what makes his character mad is his visions, not himself. He knew in his heart that he was a weak man and that he had fallen under the spell of high society through his own fault, but he didn't want to make his character like him so he made him mad instead of simply pathetic. He was suffering for something, Mathias, but his mistake was never revealing what that was. If he had openly revealed his argument, if he had written something where his own inability to fit social conventions had been the cause of his decline rather than these fairytale hallucinations, then he would have been remembered. It's an unbelievably sad story and it's sad because he couldn't acknowledge his responsibility for falling into a trap that other people managed to avoid. And I know this because I have spent every day since I was nine years old too scared to fall asleep at night because of what I see in my dreams. I know this because no matter how much I tell myself it was my fault, there's this tiny part of me that wants me to think that it wasn't."

Mathias had no words. The eye of the storm was passing over and everything was still, the electric natural energy having gone out of it. Lukas was crying in a way that Mathias had never seen anyone cry before. Every sob moved his whole body, every sound was deep and desperate and ancient, a cry of agony that predated thought and language. His misery seemed to pour out of some bottomless well of pain, the depths of which could never be imagined. Mathias wanted to say something, but in that moment he came to realise what he should have seen a long time before: that sometimes it was best to say nothing. Slowly, hesitantly, expecting to be stopped, he reached out and pulled Lukas into an embrace. When he was not resisted, he brought him closer in a silent gesture of comfort. The eye went over and the storm returned with a screaming clatter of wind and hail. He stayed where he was, with Lukas sobbing onto his shoulder, his eyes shut against the scene outside, the noise tormenting his ears and his mind challenged and terrified by all that Lukas had revealed.


	13. A Love Beyond Death

Copenhagen, 20th November 1831

The first snow of the winter was coming in, blown in slanting flurries by the wind. Thick, shapeless flakes collected damply against the window panes, more sleet than anything else. Mathias watched their progress without interest, shivering as the draughts blew down the chimney and into the room. There was no money left, not even enough for firewood. He had had to dismiss the servants a good few weeks ago now, although he was no longer certain when. Everything was blurring, his once razor-sharp novelist's eye blinded and turned inwards by the addiction that was eating him from the inside out. He felt like a ghost, standing in the near-darkness of his formerly splendid drawing room, the dust-sheeted furniture looming in his peripheral vision like the corpses of monstrous creatures. He reached into the pocket of last season's coat, now outmoded, and his hand closed around the last bottle, the last one he would ever need. He had sold his gold pocket watch to afford it.

He wondered what his life would have been like if he had taken Gilbert's advice and married. He would even now have been sampling the delights of this or that party with a beautiful woman on his arm, a woman who could quite possibly already be carrying his heir within her body. He wondered what his child would have looked like. If a boy, he would have called him Lukas. With luck, his inspiration would have returned and he would have been able to manufacture a few more anodyne comedies to keep the money coming in. Lukas would have become a half-remembered opium dream, and Mathias would have done the thing all men like him did and force himself, despite the agony it caused him, to forget the former lover. He would have tried instead to find satisfaction in the unappealing embrace of a woman he did not care for.

But all this wondering was pointless. The fact was that, since that night at the party, he had been out of favour. Gilbert had ceased to associate with him, the invitations had dried up, and he was no longer called upon to provide his famous wit. Elizaveta was expecting a child, and Gilbert had asked another man, a composer – named Edelstein or something, if his destroyed mind remembered correctly – to stand as godfather rather than him. Mathias felt an unexpected wave of emotion rising in him as he reflected on the fact that a friendship that had endured since childhood could be so quickly and completely destroyed by the need to save face in the eyes of other people. He remembered summers at one or other of their country estates – the thrill of being let loose for days on end, of dangling their feet in the brooks that ran through the forests, of climbing trees and playing at being opposing armies until one of the faceless, forgotten servants came to call them in for dinner. Oh, he thought, how different the two little boys had become as men!

Somewhere across the city, Gilbert's new play was premiering. Its title was Truth in Marriage – a nice little irony, Mathias thought, in view of their last conversation on the subject. He was not invited to the premiere, although he could have listed every single person who was. There would be Gilbert's younger brother Ludwig, the army officer, walking arm-in-arm with the Venetian ambassador's daughter. There would be Arthur Kirkland, the new cynical voice of satire who was attracting quite a following, probably trying to catch the eye of the American girl in the lead role. There would be Francis Bonnefoy, famous critic and infamous decadent, watching studiously in order to report on the night's events in the newspaper's theatre and society pages. A single barbed comment from him could be the beginning of someone's social decline, and a single good review could launch and sustain a career. Mathias had seen the man's huge influence and unforgiving observational skills before. A man who had neglected to pull out a chair for his hostess had been noted in the next morning's news and had soon found that he was no longer welcome at certain gatherings. A young girl who had declined to dance with the extremely eligible son of her host was now thirty years old and still unmarried. Nothing escaped the gaze of this reporter, but more toxic still was the anonymously-written gossip column. To appear there was to have done something worthy of social excommunication. Mathias's name had been mentioned several times, a reliable litmus test of his falling popularity.

The first time had not been the worst.

Whether 'author' Mathias Køhler is still deserving of that title is a matter for debate. At a recent dance given at the house of a distinguished lady, few of the guests could name his most recent novel and not a single one of them had read it. Perhaps he should return to his island, where this writer is certain that the gulls will be a more attentive audience.

He could survive attacks on his talent since they were, to an extent, truthful. It was the vitriolic nature of the first remark he objected to, not its content. Other comments had been in the same vein, although some had made reference to his lack of money, but the most recent one had been the most dangerous.

It was lately remarked on at an intimate gathering at the home of a renowned literary gentleman that, despite the number of eligible girls, the former author Mathias Køhler has remained unmarried. Far be it from this writer to suggest something so vulgar, but it has been posited that perhaps his desires are satisfied by something else entirely.

It was unprecedented for something hinting at something so undesirable, so illegal, to appear in a newspaper read by everyone. Anyone with a spare penny and rudimentary education bought and read it, discarding the weighty stories in order to find out who had worn what were and who was doing, or thought to be doing, what with whom. He knew that his servants had heard the last rumour – he saw it in the way they looked at him, and when he was forced to dismiss them because he could no longer pay their wages, the young boys were particularly relieved to go. With that single piece of gossip, truer than the writer could ever have known, he had reached his nadir. His transformation from a popular, carefree young author with a sharp wit and wide group of friends into a penniless, laudanum-addicted social outcast with unspeakable predilections had been completed, and now there was nothing more left in the world for him.

On the small card table at the centre of the room lay a tattered notepad, its pages bleached by sun and salt and its leather cover stained by the sea. In it was his great novel, his masterpiece, the monumental work that would lay bare the hypocrisies of high society and the vast, rotting emptiness at its heart – or so he had once imagined. It should have been a fearless indictment of the way an entire social class lived and the way they treated both their own and those below them but, in his eternal reticence, he had been unable to state his meaning plainly. The final admission of this weakness had been clear in his inability to acknowledge it. He had been too afraid of his own inability to resist the easy traps of wit, wine and conversation to bring it to the fore and he had been unable to bear giving a character with Lukas's perfect name and face his own faults. And so the story was an incoherent mess, where genuine insights mingled with incongruent fantasy and the main character was by turns the passive object of the narrator's worship and a brittle young man attempting to survive the strains of a life he had once coveted.

Mathias went over to the table and sat in his one remaining chair – since running out of money, he had burnt all the others to heat the freezing rooms. He opened the book and slowly flicked through the pages, not reading everything but occasionally noticing a particularly luminous phrase. He could be proud of the vision he had had for this book, he thought, if not its reality. The pages of looping black writing spiralled away and away, the paper seeming so insubstantial, and for a moment he was lost in a vision of carving his message in stone, setting it in the wall of some vast temple where it could be seen and, over time and by virtue of its immutability, become truth.

Quickly, too quickly, he came to the last page of the book that would never be finished, that he had never even given a title. He reached for his pencil and, straining to see in the invading, consuming darkness, wrote the last line – not of the story, but of what he could say.

They found him to be mad, and mocked him, and those whose lives were spent cultivating appearances ridiculed one who was bold enough to show his face unmasked and unadorned.

And that truly was all he could say, the most damning thing he could write about high society – that it was a group of people who valued artifice above sincerity to the point that people were afraid to be who they were, and those who were not afraid were punished by all the weapons in the considerable arsenal of slander, libel and simple old-fashioned contempt. He understood, so much more than he had in his days of being a vapid, fashionable dandy, what it was like to be on the receiving end of such haughty censure. He stared at the paper for a few moments, reflecting on the sad trajectory of what he had once hoped would be a glorious writing career, and remembered with a tear in his eye his childhood love of books, the reams of paper he had covered in his boyish, uncertain script. Writing had sustained him through all the attacks of measles and scarlet fever, all the rainy days, all the times when he was banished to his room as punishment for some trivial misdemeanour. He shut his eyes against the vividness of the memory and tore another page out of the back of the book. He was going to write a letter. It would be his last, and in it would be his last request to anyone, for he had resolved to die, and he was doing so on his own terms.

Gilbert,

I pray that you will see this before any others do. I am certain that you will. You must. Forgive my urgency – I am most agitated at present.

In this book is the novel I have been working on for more than a year. It is incomplete, but I cannot bring myself to end it because to me there is no way of doing so satisfactorily. You are a man of letters – you, more than any other of my former friends, understand the drive for perfection that all good writers must feel. It is the fact that this ambition is not matched by talent that bars me from entering the pantheon of genius that you, my dear friend, will one day inhabit.

Pathetic flattery. Gilbert was no more a writer than he was, but, Mathias thought uncharitably, he was also childishly desperate for compliments. Putting that sentence in would make Gilbert more inclined to listen to him – and besides, this was the last time he would ever debase himself in such a way again. He resumed writing.

I do not feel that I know you any longer, and I do not feel that you wish to know me. If this is the case, and if this letter brings you no peace, discard it, and the book, do not read either and think no more on the matter. If, however, you retain some of the warm feelings for me that you did in our youth and indeed until so recently, then I must prevail upon you for one last favour. I must ask that you see this book is published, by whatever means necessary. I doubt that it will be read, but it must be available to read, so that if even one person happens upon it and understands my meaning then my life will not have been entirely wasted, and I might go to my judgement in the knowledge that I did something of value. I understand that you may not agree with the sentiments within the story, but I would beg of you to see that they are my sincerest thoughts. You once asked me if I had any beliefs of my own. I do, and they are all contained within this tragedy of a young man a little like me and a little like a man I once knew. You are my greatest friend, Gilbert, and I believe that I can trust you with the knowledge that I loved him. I have always been a lover of men; you were correct in your veiled assumption. I once loved you, and it was the pain of this attraction that caused me to embark on my cursed voyage to the distant island.

There is only one thing, then, that remains for you to do. Destroy this letter, and speak of it to no one. I have not seen you in months; I have no way of knowing what you now feel towards me, but I trust that you will honourably carry out a man's last request.

I remain, as ever, your faithful servant and sincere friend.

Mathias Køhler

Mathias walked along the seafront, feeling strangely calm. All things considered, he had no reason not to be: all that needed to be put in order was in order, and all his decisions had been made. The letter lay on top of his book, and he knew that very soon he would be unable to control who read it. He also knew that equally soon, he would be beyond knowing or caring what people thought of him. It gave him an odd sense of relief to know that, in all probability, his memory would not long outlast him. The knowledge made him feel that he could do things for himself, not for posterity. He had left the door of his house unlocked and its interior unlit, and had paused at the end of the street to observe it, observe the despairing blackness of its windows and the shadows where it seemed that night had begun to claim the place from the inside. What would happen to it once he was gone was a matter that did not concern him. For all he cared, they could raze the place to the ground with all his worthless possessions inside – all apart from his novel of course. That was the one thing belonging to him that he considered to have value.

From the waterside drinking places poured light and music and laughter. He could hear the screech of violins, tuneless but joyful singing and the occasional fight. There was warmth in the run-down buildings, and life, and the light seemed to possess a different, more friendly quality from that of the chandeliers in the houses of his wealthy friends. He wondered what his life might have been like if he had slipped into the world here, or in one of the small houses that clustered alongside the docks. He wondered if he might have been happy, or at least more fulfilled. The one regret that continued to trouble his mind was that his true purpose in life had never been fully revealed to him.

"Lovely evening, isn't it?" a passing sailor called out to him, his voice loud and thick with drink.

Mathias reflexively touched two fingers to the brim of his hat as if greeting a society acquaintance. "It is indeed!" he replied, a strange sort of levity in his voice now that he knew how the rest of his life would play out. The cold no longer bit him so deeply; he had an almost omniscient sense of the impermanence of things. It was only now that his life was ending that he had understanding of it. With a wry smile, he wished that he had written that line down.

After a while, he came to place where it was possible to walk down to the shore. Boats lay at anchor, seemingly jostling for space along the quayside, their chains and tackles jingling as they moved. He remembered the last time he had been in a boat, when he had stared into soft darkness of the blue depths and remembered his last night with Lukas. The memories had been as vivid as real life then. Now some of them had slipped away from him, every irresistible drop of laudanum rendering them a little less clear, and to be without his memories was a torture he could not bear to endure. Lukas had been everything to him: his true love, his muse, the one person who could truly understand him and his reason to live. But he was also a man, as well as a thing of the sea, and for those reasons he and Mathias could never be together. And without him, Mathias had no reason to live.

The sea was rough, and as the wind rose, Mathias felt several shards of spray spatter against his face. He looked down at where the very first bold wavelets were beginning to wash over his feet and knew that his time had come. He reached into his pocket.

The laudanum burnt his throat, and he nearly choked it all up again. Never in his life had he consumed a whole bottle, not even on that night so long ago that had started everything. With numbed senses, he peered into the depths, thinking about how much there was that still remained unknown to him – things that now he would never know. The stars were shining, peeping out from behind the thin gauzy clouds. How strange, he mused. They always seemed to be there at the crucial moments in his life, and here, now, he came to hate them. They did nothing. They only watched him. They seemed almost voyeuristic, observing all the best and worst moments of his life. He remembered what he had said to Lukas about wishing on a star and now he wondered what dying men were supposed to wish for. A reason to live again? Perhaps, but nothing could give him that.

"I want to see you again," he whispered, addressing Lukas even as his eyes were on the stars. "I want to love you again and keep my promise to you. And I will see you again, I swear it. We will meet again, even if it is not in the way you expect." Tears were blurring his vision, making the stars seem huge and faint. He tried to take a deep breath and found that he could not, that his chest was tight with the effects of the overdose. His heart thudded in his ears like a muffled funeral drum and when he looked down at his fingernails, they were tinted with deoxygenated blue. He let out a panicked sob as it became even harder to breathe and his head began to feel clouded from the lack of air. More tears spilled out and he swallowed, feeling like he was choking. What were dying men supposed to think of? Their mothers? His mother had died giving birth to him. Their wives? Well, in part it had been his inability to find a wife that had led him to this. All he could think of was Lukas and now, too late for anything to happen, he found himself caught up in visions of the life they might have led together, if only their origins were not so vastly different and if only society were a little more open. A world where love between men was accepted – well, he thought bitterly, that was a story beyond even his imagination.

He took a step forward and the water foamed and surged around his ankles, numbing his feet. His breathing was irregular and desperate, becoming more so as his starved lungs tried to pull in more and more air. His clothes were heavy; the more steps he took, the more insistently he sea tugged at him and pulled him down. He cried unrestrainedly, finally free of the need to appear a certain way. He cried for his own pitiful life; for Lukas, whom he had loved in the fullest and purest sense of the world, with the unrestrained joy that in his former cynicism he would have denied existed; for all the people trapped in the web of society from birth to death; for his own wretchedness as a lover of men, a laudanum addict and a suicide. For the last time, he looked behind him and took in the crowded seafront, with its thousands of lives merging and separating or continuing alone. His own life had only minutes left to run, and he was glad of it. He was a supernumerary, needed by no one except the person who could never truly be with him, and there was no reason for him to live any longer and suffer further humiliation at the hands of the soulless, single-minded organism of society.

By now the water was up to his chest. With the combination of this pressure and the tightness caused by the laudanum, he could only snatch breaths; desperate, shallow breaths. His heart was slowing further with every beat, and soon it would stop altogether. Best to end this torture now, he decided. With a last step forward, he was totally submerged, blinded by the dark sea. The old poem echoed in his ears: With his last rites unsaid and him unmourned/ He drowns, unbaptised, in the sea-foam font. He had always known he would meet his death by drowning. It was not as frightening as his childhood nightmares had been, but he was unprepared for the violent, electrifying cold and the forcefulness of the current. He could not breathe, and this time there was no Lukas with him to reassure him. But he could imagine that he was there, for the one thing that would never fade from his memory was Lukas's unique, ethereal beauty. With his love's image in his mind, and a strange, quiet calm in his heart, he closed his burning eyes and opened his lungs to the water.

…

Havmann Island, 21st March 2013

In his hands, Mathias held the single most important discovery of his life. The letter was unassuming at first; a single piece of paper dried and yellowed with the years, covered in dense black writing. He had found it that morning, unexpectedly.

The end of the storm had woken him, the sudden silence as startling as any noise. He had not expected to sleep, and had no recollection of doing so, but he must have because Lukas had slipped out of the room without him noticing. Alone in the calmness, he had had time to think about what Lukas had said the previous night and had returned to the book with fresh eyes. What he had read had surprised him – for the first time, he had seen evidence of the things which had stood out so clearly to Lukas: the veiled meaning, the cowardly metaphors, the careful avoidance of issues. What had seemed to him to be subtlety now showed itself to be reticence; what had appeared to be allegorical now seemed silly and trite. For a long time he had sat with the book open at the last page, his mind grappling with the conflicting thoughts of his predecessor. He so desperately wanted to keep him as his hero, to continue to admire him, but he was no longer sure if he should or could in light of this new interpretation of his work. He had reread all his favourite scenes, all the lines that had stood out to him when he had first seen them, but now the book was different – now that Lukas had made his pronouncement, Mathias felt that it no longer belonged to him, that he had relinquished his right to call himself the 'expert' on the man who shared his name but increasingly seemed to share nothing else.

Still wrapped in these concerns, he had gone over to the window to inspect the island following the storm. The sky was still grey, but lighter now, like cigarette smoke, and the grass gleamed with glassy drops of rain. He had reached up to open it, to let the breeze in, and his hand had brushed against something hidden high in the wall. The letter. It had taken him a long time to extract it from its hiding place deep in the crevice between two of the bricks, and he had known straightaway that it had been hidden deliberately, that it had never been meant to be found. He had read it through three times and he still could not quite digest it. It changed things; it confirmed things he had privately theorised and built on his tentative ideas. And Lukas needed to see it. He needed to share in this discovery, for it was as much his as it was Mathias's. And he would show it to him, in a moment. First, though, he needed to look over it one last time. He began to read.

My Dearest, My Truest, My Most Beloved Lukas

I write this in the knowledge that you will never read it, and if it were otherwise then I would not be able to set down these thoughts at all. I write today for the same reason I always have: to make sense of my life and the acts I commit in this life and perhaps, in some small way, to justify them.

My darling, nothing causes me more pain at this moment than my having to leave you. Looking back now on my life before I came here, I am filled with dread at its imminent return, and my love for you blazes even brighter against its dismal background. There is not a single thing I want more than to stay here forever and make a life with you, and if I were a stronger man I would do so in an instant. But I am a weak man, one easily swayed by the demands of society, and I cannot resist them for long. I am a fool, and I do not deserve your true and noble love. I do not deserve the constancy and faith which you have always shown me, and continue to show me. I will never love anyone else, and I do not wish to now that I have had you.

I have tried to explain my life on land to you, and I have seen you try to understand. I doubt whether you could make any sense of the complexities, contradictions and overwhelming hypocrisy of which high society is composed. Indeed, I hardly understand them myself. More than that, I do not know why I am so desperate to by accepted by a world that so hates those like me. Those like us.

Lukas, my love, believe me when I say that I love you. I am not only a weak man but an insincere one, and my life is founded on lies, but the one shining and eternal truth by which I live is the love I have for you. I had never felt love before I met you, not in the true sense of the world. I thought I had. I loved a man once, and it was the pain of these unreturned feelings that almost killed me. But when I began to love you, I saw that I had not even understood the word. To me, you are the embodiment of the Classical ideals, the Renaissance glory and the modern Romantic passion. None of these words will mean anything to you, so let me explain it thus: beauty such as yours has been worshipped throughout all history. It has been worshipped as I, with an intensity of feelings beyond words, have so often worshipped at your pristine altar. Your body sets me alight; it is perfect, and satisfies all my desires. I would gladly adore you for all my life; I would gladly look on nothing but you until the moment of my death.

I close then, my love – my true love, my only love, the summation of all the good in the world – with this last declaration of my feelings and demonstration of my weakness. You see, Lukas, even as I write this, the desire for sweet oblivion has overcome me, and I have drunk deeply of it.

If you still want me, to the end of time I will remain

Your Mathias

The words were stirringly intimate, vaguely erotic, and Mathias felt strange frissons of pleasure coupled with shame at reading something never meant to be read. Parts of the letter continued to echo in his mind as he walked into the kitchen to pass it on to Lukas like the oldest sort of chain letter. Lukas was leaning against the worktop, clasping a cup of coffee and looking off into the distance, his thoughts clearly turned inwards. He looked up as Mathias approached and smiled shyly, inviting conversation in a way unusual for him.

"Are you alright after last night?" Mathias asked, his voice tight with sudden awkwardness.

Lukas nodded in reply. "Yes, thank you. I just couldn't sleep thinking about that book, so I got up early to work on your portrait. It's coming along quite well."

"Are you making me look beautiful?" Mathias joked, at ease for once.

"I did say you have a good face for drawing." Lukas said, smiling again, then looked away with a quick, nervous motion.

Mathias continued watching him, a similar awkward smile rising unbidden. Damn this being in love, he thought. The letter had unsettled him. He knew Lukas, that was the crux of it. He knew him like a memory, he knew the fathomless darkness of his eyes and the elegant figure that was as slight and luminous as the crescent moon. Crescent. He vaguely remembered its origin. Latin, meaning 'increasing' or something like that. Increasing. But what was increasing? His love? He felt his heart thudding heavily in the pit of his stomach. Lukas raised his cup to his lips with an air of consideration and Mathias found his gaze drawn to the pale hands. They were so delicate, he thought, so suited to Lukas's chosen calling, to handling the infinite and infinitesimal gradations of pencil, the minute differences between dark and light. Art was a precarious dance between the two opposites. Like themselves. His hand went to his pocket.

"I found something," he said, his mouth dry. The paper crackled as he withdrew it from his pocket.

"What's that?" Lukas asked, setting down his cup and going over to him.

"A letter," Mathias replied. "I think you should read it. It's important. It changes a lot of things, things I thought I understood. It sort of backs up what you said to me last night." He handed over the letter. It looked right in Lukas's hands, and he had a sense of everything being put back in order now that the letter had reached its intended recipient at last.

Lukas read through slowly, and Mathias waited for him to finish with bated breath. He was afraid of a negative reaction, of Lukas feeling shocked or simply removed from these people who just happened to share their names, who just happened to have been desperately and futilely in love. The letter felt like a link between the past and present and a confirmation or validation of the idea that he and Lukas were meant to come together. In this morning, this light, Lukas was beautiful, divinely so, the pale light through the window like a halo framing the silver-gold of his hair. Mathias felt a flood of electricity through his body. He wanted to take Lukas in his arms and kiss him, to love him and show him that he could still have and deserve love in spite of his past. He bit the inside of his cheek and hoped his face wasn't going red.

"It's so sad." Lukas said simply after a long moment. He lowered the paper and his eyes were gleaming with as-yet-unshed tears. There was the faintest tremor in his voice.

Mathias nodded. "I know." he replied. He could hear the waves crashing on the beach below them. Lukas placed the letter on the table, apparently relieved to no longer be touching it. He sniffed.

"It's just… There were so many secrets, you know. He couldn't tell the truth about anything so he lied and lied and lied until he couldn't even be truthful in the book that was supposed to lay bare his soul. His life was wasted – all those fine things he could have said but didn't say! He could have said society was a poison and a disease, and if he had then he would have been remembered. He could have said he loved men, and then he would have become a figurehead for the cause. We'd still be reading him now."

Mathias shook his head. "He would have been a martyr," he replied. "They wouldn't have let him live for something like that. He would have ended up like Oscar Wilde – prison, poverty and early death."

Lukas sighed. "But he died young anyway, didn't he? Better a martyr than a suicide, don't you think?" When Mathias failed to respond, he went on. "He chose death over life without this Lukas person," He brushed away a tear with a precise, angry motion. "They were split apart like every couple is eventually. I don't know what else he thought would happen. It's not as if they could have been together, the way the world was then," He faltered then, and for a tiny moment it seemed as though he might go forward to Mathias, looking for comfort the way he had the night before. Instead, he took a decisive step back, half-turning towards the door. "And if you love someone so much that death is better than life without them, then maybe it's a dangerous mistake to love at all." he said bleakly. He opened the door and quickly went out, pulling it shut with a firm click. Clearly, he did not want to be followed.

Mathias stood frozen in shock in the centre of the room, all that Lukas had said echoing in his mind and mingling with the words of the letter. Something – perhaps his developing knowledge of how to deal with Lukas – told him to wait a while before going after him. He picked up the incendiary piece of paper and studied it, only letting his eyes rest on the writing without actually reading it. It was a thing of beauty, every letter immaculately formed with little flourishes at the ends of words. The writing, like all writing, was powerful; it memorialised the long-ago emotion and kept it immediate. He looked around the room as though for the first time, excited by the idea of the first Mathias having been there before him. Could his predecessor have sat in his window seat, or bent over his notebook at the corner table, or paced the same floor looking for the perfect simile, the exact word to make a beautiful sentence sublime. And would his Lukas, whoever he was, have been there too? Yes, he must have. Mathias tried to imagine them together but it was like seeing himself and his own Lukas; it was too strange, and his mind refused to show it to him.

It was not until late afternoon that he judged it safe to go and find Lukas. He had spent most of the day tormented by his rising, irresistible feelings of love to the point that he had realised that it was a case of confess or go mad. These thoughts had invaded every part of his mind, stopping him from reading or writing or looking out of the window – even eating. Now he was on the beach. Lukas was a little way off, his clothes a bold streak of black against the anodyne colours of the sand and misty water. He stood staring out to sea, and from his vantage point Mathias could make out a few notes, diluted by distance, of a mournful song that he had heard before, somewhere, so long ago. Perhaps at school, or hummed into his cot to calm an infant tantrum – he could not have said for certain. Perhaps even before then, in another life. The wind was rising – soon the sun would begin to set and the air would sharpen and taken on its evening chill. There was no chance of a storm, but the night out here in the Norwegian Sea would nonetheless be punishingly cold. He began his approach down the sands.

Never before had Lukas seemed more delicate, more volatile, than now. He was like a dark, velvety-winged butterfly; Mathias half-feared that he would fly away if confronted.

"You've been out here a while." he said with forced lightness.

Lukas turned to face him, cheeks red and sticky with hours-old tears. "I had a lot to think about." he replied, folding his arms.

"It's getting cold."

"I don't feel it."

Mathias sighed. "Lukas, please, what's wrong?" he asked desperately, tired of their delicate evasion of the issue at heart. Emil might as well have been standing there between them; so strongly was he there in spirit that a physical body could hardly have added anything to his presence. He was the millstone around both of their necks, the unavoidable consequence of an indelible act.

"Love never does any good," Lukas replied. "It can only ever hurt. When a friend dies, that's sad. When someone you love dies, it's a tragedy. You can recover from one but not the other, and if you love someone you shouldn't want to recover." His tone was defiant, but Mathias saw the meaning he was so obliquely hinting at.

"You loved Emil, didn't you?" he asked, though it was hardly a question.

Lukas nodded, undone. He took a step towards Mathias and then stopped, hopelessly caught between the past he could not escape and the future he did not believe he deserved.

"Yes, I loved him," he said at length, beginning to cry once more. "I don't know if you can understand. He wasn't just my best friend. He was a little brother to me, and I adored him. I didn't know him very long but you don't really need to know someone for a long time to love them, do you? I loved him. I would have done anything for him. Those few weeks we played together, I was so happy. We swore to stay friends our whole lives, and our friendship killed him."

Mathias came forward and tentatively placed a hand on Lukas's shoulder. Their eyes met and Lukas gave a watery smile.

"You don't give up, do you?" he said. "I tried to make you give up. Anyone else would have, but I suppose you're not like anyone else. I was so awful to you when we first met, and it was because I didn't know what to think of you. Even after I told you not to get involved, you insisted. You cared, and it didn't bother you when you found out the truth. You didn't judge. You tried to understand, but eventually you managed to accept that there were some things you never could," He moved closer to Mathias. "You're a truly kind person. You have a sincere heart, and…" He stopped for a long moment. "… And I really do like you a lot."

Mathias pulled him into his arms so that Lukas's head rested against his chest. "I knew you were worth the effort," he said. "The more you struggled, the more I knew you really did need help. Even when you told me to leave you alone, I couldn't. I don't hate you for what you did, but I do hate the fact that you hate yourself. And I really like you too."

Lukas sighed, leaning a little more heavily against Mathias. "I do feel guilty," he said. "And even if it's not quite the same as cold-blooded murder, I do have to accept a degree of responsibility. The pain and the guilt will always be there. The nightmares will still come regardless of what I do, and no matter how much you try to help me you can't be with me in my dreams."

Mathias gazed down into the troubled, limitless depths of his blue eyes, feeling his heart swell with a mixture of love and compassion. "I know I can't be with you in your dreams," he said reassuringly. "But I can be beside you while you sleep," He took a deep breath. "I love you, Lukas," he said. "I love you, but I would never insult your strength by saying love could be a cure. You're so much stronger than I could ever be, and I love you for that."

Lukas's eyes widened in shock and for a second Mathias feared that he had gone too far, that he had ruined the friendship they had so carefully built around the innumerable obstacles they had encountered along the way. Friendship was a wonderful thing, yes, but how could he be satisfied with friendship now that he had felt love?"

"And… And I love you too Mathias," Lukas said at last, quietly and sincerely. "You're better than the others. I trust you. I've told you more about me than I've ever told anyone, even all the people who try to split my mind apart and read the secrets there. You're curious, I know you are, but you respect me as well."

Mathias leaned down and, as though it was the most natural thing for them to do, their lips met in a perfect kiss. He tasted the faintest hint of salt and a memory-emotion ripped through him, its power almost making him weak. It was familiar, and it was like a blessing on this new love. Something was being put right, here and now. Something was being put to an end, and something else was being built on it. He let himself luxuriate in the kiss for what must have been several minutes. He wrapped his arms around Lukas's waist and pulled him closer so that they were pressed up against each other, fitting together seamlessly. Every part of him on fire with the emotion that he had never before felt but that was somehow, in the strangest way, familiar. How could he have ever thought himself in love before? This was incomparable, beyond even his author's vocabulary. Eventually, they broke apart, and sought each other's eyes.

"Lukas!" Mathias cried out, laughing with the pure joy of their having come together at last. He cupped Lukas's pale face in his hands. "You're so beautiful," he said reverently. "So incredibly beautiful. Has anyone ever told you that?"

Lukas smiled – a real one, wide and bright and displaying his almost-perfect teeth - there was a tiny chip out of one of them. Mathias made a mental note to ask him about how it had happened at some point. There would be time for all that, to discover all the silly little things about each other, the things that would never have interested anyone else. "No, no one ever has," Lukas replied happily. "So you have the honour of being the first."

"Everyone else must have been looking the wrong way." Mathias said. They kissed again, and he realised with joy that they could do this every day, that love really could be forever. He tasted the salt again, and wondered whether it was from Lukas's tears, or from the sea, or both, and in the end decided that it didn't matter. What mattered was that the tears were dry, and that if there were ever any more then he would be there to stop them.

Afterwards, they stood separately, and were quiet for several minutes. Each knew that the other had his own thoughts to untangle in the aftermath of such an event. The tide slowly advanced up the beach, the water silty from the sifting sand, and soon it came to lap at their feet, as though reminding them that they were in a place not their own, that the sea was coming to claim its due.

"I'll never forget him, you know." Lukas said eventually.

Mathias took his hand. "I know," he replied. "But you can be happy at the same time. You're a good friend for never forgetting, and I'm sure you were a wonderful big brother to him."

"When I read that letter," Lukas said slowly. "That was the first time I'd cried over anything that wasn't Emil in sixteen years. I can't really explain it, but when I read it I felt like someone was telling me it was alright, that I was forgiven. It was such a sad letter, such a sad story, and I think I understand the book a bit better now, knowing that Lukas was real. I hope they were reunited somehow, even if it was after death."

Mathias nodded. "I'm sure they were," he agreed. He gestured to the advancing sea. "We should go inside. The tide's coming in, and it'll be dark soon."

"Yes, you're right," Lukas said. "I do like it when the tide's coming in, though. You find strange things. My cross clip washed up on the beach when I was little. It's always felt like mine. I don't know why, it just always has."

"This world is full of strange things," Mathias said. "But sometimes the beauty is in the strangeness." This said, together they walked up the sand to the small house that was already beginning to feel like home. The sun was setting and already the first few stars were appearing in the pink sky. They would be bright tonight.

And so the two lovers were, in the purest and truest way, united – or, perhaps, reunited, depending on your point of view. The letter lay on the table; in the morning Mathias would take it down to the sea. The ink would be washed away and for a single vanishing instant, the first Mathias would be one whose name truly was 'writ in water', a name that for a moment would mingle with that of his beloved Lukas, and the star-crossed couple would at last be put to rest. But that lay in the future, and for now they had only themselves to think about. And perhaps it was the blissful conceit of a newly-joined pair of lovers, but to them it felt almost as though the tide moved to their rhythm, as though the stars had aligned themselves into the most auspicious pattern to bless their coupling, and as though they were the axis of the earth's movement. And it was, perhaps, the fulfilment of a prophecy, or a cynic might have said the satisfaction of desire, but the truth of it was that it was the fusing of two incomplete souls who had found their missing pieces, a perfect and unbreakable union, built not on the irrevocable past, nor depending on the capriciousness of the future, but simply founded on the certainty of the present and of each other.

And, in the cool, dark stillness following, Mathias looked at the stars. The window was open a crack and the breeze varyingly caused the curtains to billow into the room and be pulled back flat against the frame. He focused his gaze on a single star, a single instant in the cosmic story, and watched it until the rest of his vision thickened to black and the star was the only thing in view.

Beside him, curled snugly against his side, Lukas slept silently, without fear and untroubled by dreams. Mathias was no hopeless romantic. He knew that this was a temporary reprieve, that there would be times when nothing could persuade Lukas to shut his eyes, times when the awful self-flagellating torture would return with a vengeance and no amount of murmured reassurances could make him doubt his guilt. But he would take such moments as they came and either do what he could to help or accept that there was nothing to do but wait them out.

As for himself, he knew that there would come a time when he doubted his own right to decide the fate of the letter, a time when he wondered if perhaps the world should know the truth about his predecessor. The letter was in the other room, but Mathias felt its presence strongly, the faded ink detailing emotions not all diminished by the years. Ultimately, he knew that the only honourable course of action was that which he had already decided. The letter had never been meant to be read; what he had to do was ensure that it was never read again. He smiled to himself, glad to finally be free of all his conflicting thoughts.

He leaned over and kissed Lukas on the cheek. Their relationship was new enough for him to still be surprised by the warmth of the skin he had always expected to be cold. He stroked his hair, studying it. Never before had he noticed how closely its colour matched the salty foam of the sea.

"I love you." he whispered for what must have been the hundredth time that night.

Lukas stirred slightly. "You too," he mumbled sleepily. "And I love this house."

"We'll come back here," Mathias promised. "I'll even buy it for you if you really want." But Lukas had already fallen asleep again, leaving Mathias to lie awake and imagine the future that they would share.

Outside, the waves rushed up the beach and retreated like an impossibly ancient sort of ritual dance. Everything was following the natural order, unchanged from when, so many years before, another love had played out on the island: a cursed love, a love between sea and shore.


End file.
